Fox and His Friends, one of Fassbinder's favorites among his work, and my first experience seeing a film by the astonishingly prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder, carries most of its appeal in the sensitive art of coalescing the out of the ordinary and the commonplace. In the world of Fox and His Friends, gay men vastly outnumber the straight people much in the same way most mainstream films have an inverted social perspective.
Fassbinder himself takes the plum lead, a naive young working-class hustler who wins the lottery and in next to no time find himself, and his lottery spoils, adopted by Munich's gay social circle. He is one of only two directors of whom I know who have cast themselves in roles that incidentally bare their dangling genitals, as if the preceding crotch shot is not rousing enough. (The other is Guy Maddin.)
This West German drama gives the impression of being about a relationship between Fassbinder's cool, masculine young punk and the outwardly amiable bourgeois son of a factory owner, but it slowly begins to head for a two-way street of class consciousness.The factory owner, we find out, is about to go out of business. The son hopes to save the company. One way out might be to fleece the effortlessly buttered up lottery winner out of his wealth, possibly using love as an excuse.
Fassbinder is terrific in his apparently complete creative control with scenes in which dialogue beyond words, subtext is unthinkable, and direct actions are impossible. This knack blossoms in the film's most thought-provoking scenes, counting a skillfully multifaceted dinner scene. The factory owner's son brings Fassbinder home to meet his parents, and it becomes distressingly evident that the only real reason sexuality is not an issue with them is because money is, though this is not implied through their actions, but their son's.
This moving piece of blatant ruthlessness, which excludes all life not within the particular intentions of its co-writer-producer-director-star, moves in and out of the now timeworn gay demiworld that has been John Rechy's atmospheric mainstay: Its bars with retro rock and roll on the jukebox and queens for barflies, its revelries, its maneuverings. And this melodrama's indications progressively grow to be sadly unmistakable, that Fox is the prey of the capitalist social order that so swiftly made him well-off, duped by "friendships" for which he doesn't even understand that he's picking up the tab.
Fassbinder himself takes the plum lead, a naive young working-class hustler who wins the lottery and in next to no time find himself, and his lottery spoils, adopted by Munich's gay social circle. He is one of only two directors of whom I know who have cast themselves in roles that incidentally bare their dangling genitals, as if the preceding crotch shot is not rousing enough. (The other is Guy Maddin.)
This West German drama gives the impression of being about a relationship between Fassbinder's cool, masculine young punk and the outwardly amiable bourgeois son of a factory owner, but it slowly begins to head for a two-way street of class consciousness.The factory owner, we find out, is about to go out of business. The son hopes to save the company. One way out might be to fleece the effortlessly buttered up lottery winner out of his wealth, possibly using love as an excuse.
Fassbinder is terrific in his apparently complete creative control with scenes in which dialogue beyond words, subtext is unthinkable, and direct actions are impossible. This knack blossoms in the film's most thought-provoking scenes, counting a skillfully multifaceted dinner scene. The factory owner's son brings Fassbinder home to meet his parents, and it becomes distressingly evident that the only real reason sexuality is not an issue with them is because money is, though this is not implied through their actions, but their son's.
This moving piece of blatant ruthlessness, which excludes all life not within the particular intentions of its co-writer-producer-director-star, moves in and out of the now timeworn gay demiworld that has been John Rechy's atmospheric mainstay: Its bars with retro rock and roll on the jukebox and queens for barflies, its revelries, its maneuverings. And this melodrama's indications progressively grow to be sadly unmistakable, that Fox is the prey of the capitalist social order that so swiftly made him well-off, duped by "friendships" for which he doesn't even understand that he's picking up the tab.