Direction: Oskar Roehler
Country: Germany
Oskar Roehler’s Enfant Terrible puts its focus on the life of unconventional filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose mundane pleasures and quest for love are portrayed here with undeniable panache. Fassbinder, remarkably impersonated by Oliver Masucci (Look Who’s Back; Never Look Away) in his most glorious role to date, was an irascible provocateur in life and in film. He never gave up on his dream to be among the greatest European directors, even after his first film, Love is Colder Than Death, a gangster film which he described as a remake of Raoul Walsh's White Heat, has been ridiculed. He could be a tyrant to the people working for him, and his homosexual relationships with actors had a tendency for the tragic.
His first obsession was Gunther Kaufman (Michael Klammer), a married black man who wanted to be in his films; the latter was followed by the restless Moroccan El Heidi ben Salem (Erdal Yildiz), the inspiration for and the lead in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974); and then Armin Meier (Jochen Schropp), a former butcher turned actor whose performances were not so prominent. The film only stresses these three, but there were more, including women.
Although incomplete and unfluctuating in mood, this biographical film gathers sufficient material for us to understand the director’s controversial personality. Soaked in alcohol and drugs, Fassbinder always said he understood his film characters in everything they did wrong in life. This was probably his mea culpa talking, a consequence of that wild fury and coarse manners that characterized him.
Keeping the tension at a fever pitch, Roehler, who worked from a script by Klaus Richter (their second collaboration), mounted it with some decadently fascinating moments.
