Katzelmacher

KATZELMACHER   ***

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1969

IDEA:  A group of desultory, financially and sexually frustrated friends respond with fear and contempt when a Greek immigrant enters their circle.

BLURB:  The vapid bourgeois characters in Katzelmacher spend all their time gossiping and demeaning each other, stalled in a recursive sequence of toxic lassitude. In their flat, ossified world, bigotry and moral sloth don’t have any pretty facades to hide behind. They are as stark and frontal-facing as the austere frames that hold the characters in place like mannequins stuck in molasses, unashamedly spewing forth from the mouths of those who see love, friendship, and community only as opportunities for exploitation. Yes, this is a Fassbinder film. But whereas the director’s later films couch all this misanthropy in variously baroque mise-en-scènes, Katzelmacher is the bare-bones version of Fassbinder’s despairing, unsparing worldview, stripped down to its lacerating parts. Essentially a series of static takes of characters exchanging insults, deadpanning morose aphorisms, and finally spouting all-too familiar xenophobic rhetoric, the film is as direct and pitiless a commentary on the social barbarism of the privileged classes as one could ask for. There is a brute, minimalist elegance here that is ruthlessly efficient, from the frankness of the dialogue to the curt, razor-edged edits that end each scene before the next starts the process all over. Even at 89 minutes, the effect of this repetitious, one-track vileness is oppressive – and no doubt, Fassbinder’s intent. His mercilessly forthright approach leaves no buffer room for his dissolute characters, or for us.