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Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder | 103 minutes | M | 55th Anniversary |
5:00pm Saturday, 16 May | Balam Balam Place - Cinema 4 | Buy Tickets | Buy Passes
Collaboration is agony in Fassbinder’s favourite Fassbinder film on its 55th anniversary.
A cast and crew wait in a Spanish hotel for their director to arrive — but when Jeff (Lou Castel) finally shows up, the show must not go on. Soaked in booze, self-loathing and a chilly sense of melodrama held at a distance, Fassbinder’s seventh film catches a legend of New German Cinema in a transitional period before slicker and better-known works like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.
The dysfunction is soundtracked by smashing glasses and weepy Leonard Cohen ballads, a screwball comedy where the laughs are bitter and hours and days become hard to pin down. The stars of the film — and the film within the film — Eddie Constantine, Hanna Schygulla and Marquard Bohm were all Fassbinder regulars, making the viewer question just how true-to-life their characters’ on-set slapping, shouting and sexing can be. There's no business like show business - and thank God for that.
SIMILAR: Irma Vep, Day for Night, All That Jazz, Cassavetes
"Has the informal manner of a practice exercise but it leaves the kind of wounds one receives in a knife fight." - Vincent Canby, NY Times
"Choked me with raw laughter at the sight of this tortured bunch of assholes who were clearly all on the choo choo train of unhappiness." - Lara Pop, Letterboxd
Country: Germany
Year: 1971
Language: German, French, English, Spanish