Compellingly downbeat tale of exploitation and fatalism in mid-seventies Bavaria. Writer-director Fassbinder stars as Franz Biberkopf - nicknamed 'Fox' - who endures a rollercoaster of good and bad fortune after losing his job at a fairground. A compulsive believer in destiny, he fulfils his goal of winning a fortune on the lottery, only to lose everything after falling in with the proverbial "bad crowd."
   But Fox's error isn't to hang around with his cash-strapped pals in the queer demi-monde of Munich: rather it's because he hooks up with some of the city's more well-heeled gay denizens - first (and, interestingly, before the lottery win) a suavely avuncular antique-dealer (Karl-Heinz Bohm) he meets while cruising a public toilet, and later a dapper young aesthete (Peter Chatel) with whom he becomes romantically and financially involved. It all ends very badly, with the moneyed upper classes deviously ripping off this rough-hewn proletarian with barely a hint of conscience.
   There is, however, an ironic aspect to Fox's demise: Fassbinder came from similarly unprepossessing origins as Fox, by the time of this film he'd become an internationally-feted eminence in the world of cinema - one of the first post-war German directors to achieve such renown. Not exactly a lottery win, of course, but this autobiographical context gives an extra dimension to a film that functions as an acerbic portrait of the shady individuals Fassbinder's success had brought him into contact with. Less than a decade later, Fassbinder himself would meet a similarly grim end to that he crafted for the hapless Fox, but whatever his faults may have been, a lack of self-awareness certainly wasn't one of them.  
   How many directors, for example, would have the chutzpah to include, only seconds after the start of their film, a painting of their own face? The camera, investigating the fairground where Fox works, makes a point of showing us the advertising board above the marquee that proclaims the presence of the attraction therein. As described by the barker (Harry Baer) who's also Fox's lover, this is a "miracle of surgery", a "disembodied head who speaks only the truth."
   And the face on the hoarding - a dunnish conglomeration of planes and angles that looks like something Francis Bacon might have tossed off (or, indeed, tossed off over) - is that of Fassbinder himself. Sadly, his budget didn't stretch to showing us Fox in "action": the amusingly ill-timed arrival of the cops to arrest the barker and close the show down means that our hero just ambles onto stage, head conspicuously attached to body, a decidedly un-freakish figure in a cheap figure-hugging denim jacket.
   Needless to say, Fox - or rather Fassbinder - goes on to "speak" the truth, or rather his version of the truth: a pitiless deconstruction of social, economic and romantic illusions in which he himself is the picked-on, trodden-down victim. Fassbinder - who cuts a disarmingly svelte and boyish figure here, in contrast to the addled, bloated behemoth of later infamy - seems to have decades of suffering in his appealing soft eyes, no matter how often his character's general ugliness and dirtiness is cattily remarked upon by the garishly-attired individuals who form his various circles. We're presented with a disconcerting disjoint between Fox/Franz and Fassbinder himself: the former the unhappy-go-lucky kitten kicked hither and yon by forces he can't begin to comprehend or control; the latter the beast-auteur, indomitably imposing his presence and character upon his film.
   As usual with Fassbinder, Fox and His Friends proceeds with disarming directness - but at two hours the pacing of this "fist-fight for freedom" (the original German title) is relatively languid, so we have plenty of time to watch the precise gradations of Fox's decline. This is partly due to the fact that the director, after devoting a long sequence to Fox's pursuit of a lottery ticket (scraping together funds; hunting down the a kiosk just before it closes, etc), doesn't include the expected scene in which Fox learns of his win. Instead, he prefers to show, in excruciating detail, how Fox is embarrassed and cruelly patronised by his snooty pals' high-society ways, and also to precisely itemise every deutschmark that changes hands - at times it seems like the actors are working not from script but from double-entry balance-sheets.
   The cumulative result is at once grittily realistic and oddly dreamlike, as if we're floating in one of Fox's escapist fantasies - a place where even the most opulent chandelier ends up being hung on far too low a ceiling, so that the inhabitants of this luxurious chamber are in constant danger of knocking themselves out cold.

Neil Young
17th April, 2009

----------------------------------------------------

original title : Faustrecht der Freiheit
director : Rainer Werner Fassbinder
country : West Germany
year : 1975
run-time : 119m (BBFC)

seen : 12th April, 2009
cinema : The Star and Shadow, Newcastle
format : 35mm
paid : £4.00

MVP : Rainer Werner Fassbinder
respected second opinion : Neil Young, Jigsaw Lounge (2002)