A tender distance

She’s a stout 60-year-old widow and cleaning lady of Polish origin. He’s a tall thirtysomething Gastarbeiter, or guest worker, from Morocco. We’re in Munich in the mid-70s. They meet one evening when she steps into the mostly empty bar she’s passed so many times, drawn in by the sensuous, foreign-sounding music. He’s at the bar, dressed in brown suit and brown shirt, hanging with his Moroccan buddies, turning down the sexual favours of a fellow barfly. “Cock broken,” he explains in broken German. The older woman orders cola and sits at a table. The younger man, egged on by his buddies, approaches her. They slow-dance and converse, and the conversation goes on and on, into the night, out of the bar, into the older woman’s foyer, where they take shelter from the rain, and, eventually, into her apartment. Despite its seeming unlikeliness, despite the overwhelming obstacles of rampant, ubiquitous racism, ageism and xenophobia, Emmi (Brigitte Mira) and Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) become lovers, and the story of their love, as told in New German Cinema wunderkind-enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), is that rarest of things: a truly believable movie romance. It’s also a masterpiece. Criterion’s just released it on a beautiful Blu-ray, with a menu featuring a beautiful montage of Emmi and Ali slow-dancing.

Fassbinder wasn’t even 30 when he made this, his 18^th film, which was inspired by two other films: The American Soldier (1970), Fassbinder’s early feature in which a character relays the story of a cleaning lady in love with an immigrant worker, and All That Heaven Allows (1955), Douglas Sirk’s melodrama in which Jane Wyman’s bourgeois widow falls in love with Rock Hudson’s young gardener. (In turn, Todd Haynes would draw inspiration from All That Heaven Allows and from Fear Eats the Soul to produce his 2002 film Far From Heaven.) Though Emmi and Ali’s love is threatened at every turn by the stupidity and cruelty of friends, neighbours, strangers, family and co-workers, Feat Eats the Soul, echoing Sirk, ends on a sombre but more optimistic note than the American Solider anecdote. But I would argue that more than anything that happens in its story, what makes Fear Eats the Soul so moving, fascinating and generous of heart is Fassbinder’s singular directorial approach—the same high style that you’d think would make the film alienating.

Few filmmakers have utilized aspects of theatre in any meaningful way. One of those few is Fassbinder, whose theatre practice was as prolific as his cinema practice. Right from the start, with those deep reds and yellows, there’s a sumptuous unity of production and costume design, lighting and photography, that both bears the influence of All That Heaven Allows’ Technicolor palate and at an expressionistic theatrical style—which creates a captivating contrast with the clean, muted acting of the cast, most especially Mira, a veteran thespian, and Salem, who appeared in several Fassbinder films and was for a time Fassbinder’s boyfriend. Above all, what distinguishes Fear Eats the Soul is Fassbinder’s loving, counterintuitive mise en scène. In scene after scene Fassbinder’s characters share the most intimate exchanges while his camera watches from a considerable distance, often with telling objects or framing devices in the foreground. There’s such tenderness is this distance, as though Fassbinder is holding his actors, cradling them, in the centre of the screen. He would continue to use framing (most memorably in a romantic scene that becomes a murder scene in Berlin Alexanderplatz), but I don’t know that any subsequent Fassbinder ever achieved quite the same feeling of belief in love as is found here.

                     

Love and theft: Poison turns 20 on DVD

A boy flies away from his Long Island home after killing his father; a scientist isolates the human sex drive in liquid form, accidentally ingests some and thereby transforms himself into a leper sex killer; a thief is sent to prison and its isolated world of erotic hierarchies: each of the disparate threads of Poison (1991), titled ‘Hero’, ‘Horror’ and ‘Homo,’ are delivered in radically different, easily distinguishable forms (the investigative report-style documentary, the low-budget drive-in 1950s sci-fi melodrama, and the lyrical memoir, respectively), yet are intimately linked by themes of ostracization and longing and interwoven in such a way that each thread reappears with cyclical regularity, loping and looping, creating a kind of narrative vertigo symbolized in ‘Horror’s flashing spiral motif. Todd Haynes’ resourceful and inventive feature debut was derived in part from the novels of Jean Genet and became a landmark for the New Queer Cinema, taking a top prize at Sundance and sparking an unusual career, one that’s allowed Haynes to bring his seemingly anti-populist sensibility to a number of surprisingly commercial, studio-backed products, such as the Douglas Sirk-homage/critique Far From Heaven (2002), the Bob Dylan biographical essay-drama I’m Not There (2007), and HBO’s mini-series adaptation of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce (2011).

Now available from Zeitgeist in a handsome 20th Anniversary Edition DVD, Poison already conveys much of what would come to mark Haynes’ approach, such as a fascination with ornate structural devices as vehicles for multi-tiered storytelling and the postmodern incorporation of popular cultural iconography (a characteristic that some might argue justifies footnotes). I’ve heard Haynes referred to as an academic or cerebral filmmaker, which strikes me as unfair, though his affection for mannered or even kitschy performances and his brazenly imitative stylistics no doubt encourages such derision. What such comments fail to account for are the spikes of genuine emotional engagement that make key scenes in his movies transcend their self-reflexive strategies: the heartbreaking end of Far From Heaven, the Heath Ledger sections of I’m Not There, the sleepy hand-job or sexy scar display scenes in Poison (displays of outright homoeroticism that many admirers no doubt wish Haynes would return to). Haynes films can feel calculated, but I don’t think they’re cold. Poison reminds us of how far Haynes has come, and just how deliciously unlikely his journey has been.

Tender mercy killings: murderous intentions clog perky postwar spousal calm in Ira Sachs' Married Life, now on DVD

1949, the Pacific Northwest. Buttoned-down Harry (Chris Cooper) is in love with Kay (Rachel McAdams), a war widow apparently one-third his age wearing in her first appearance a conspicuously vertiginous bun in her supernaturally Hitchcock blonde hair. Harry's in love, so Harry needs to leave his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson). But Harry fears the shock will kill poor Pat, and thus Harry figures he’d best beat the grim reaper to the punch and just quietly, mercifully poison her to death. Watching all this from the sidelines and itching for a chance to get in the game is Richard (Pierce Brosnan), Harry’s dapper, dashing old buddy with the sly eyes who wears his hat just so. He offers his cabin in the woods for Harry and Kay to tryst the night away but all the while has his eyes on the prize.

Based on John Bingham’s 1953 novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, which also goes by the decidedly less cagey title of The Tender Poisoner, Married Life ostensibly excavates post-war repression but really works best as a multiple character study and mood piece that bows devoutly in the direction of the filmmakers whose work drew upon the shadow side of that period’s optimistic façade: Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls (or at least The Reckless Moment, that marvelously coded domestic noir) and the aforementioned master of suspense. There’s even a scene in which a fateful decision is made while watching a James Mason movie. Directed by Ira Sachs, this movie, a cocktail of equal parts neo-noir and black comedy, is nicely paced and quite engaging, if rather over-calculated and over-reliant on conventional attitudes toward the era’s conformist principals. But maybe its themes seemed just so 1949, or at least 2002, the year of Todd Haynes’ sublime Sirk homage Far From Heaven—Married Life didn’t have much of a life at the box office. It’s now looking for a new one on DVD.

Married Life's distance from its 60-year-old story becomes critical rather than just temporal by way of pairing its characters’ outwardly dominant traits with their polar opposites. Harry is the picture of the gentle company man and supportive spouse, but he’s fucking homicidal; Pat seems the ever-adoring, erotically undemanding homemaker about to get ditched for a younger sexpot, but truth is she’s a minx who thinks people get married first and foremost to get laid on a regular basis; Richard is the poster boy for elegantly aging sexual nomadism but deep down is getting all choked up about settling down and picking out the curtains with Kay. In every case these potentially too-cute character reversals are given breath and texture by the superb cast, Clarkson especially. Only McAdams feels a bit flat here. Totally hot, but flat. (Just like, to twist an expression, Georgia asphalt.) After seeing her shine in The Lucky Ones, it strikes me as kinda funny that she’s more at home playing a soldier than a soldier’s wife.