Fox and His Friends [DVD] [1975] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Like the characters in past Fassbinder films, like The Merchant of Four Seasons and Fear Eats the Soul, Fox is led to his downfall, but also embraces it. As a character, he is blinded by love; and although we know that he regrets his actions the moment he has taken them, he proceeds regardless... convinced that he's doing the right thing for the person he loves. Fassbinder also makes light of the idea of how money changes people. Not just those that have come into money, but those 'surrounding' people who have come into money. At the beginning of the film, Fox tries desperately to collect enough money for his weekly lottery ticket... begging friends and family for loose change and convinced that this week he's going to win. In these first few scenes, Fassbinder has painted Fox as a loveable loser; so, when we find out later that the character has indeed won the grand jackpot of 500,000 German marks, we, as an audience, are ultimately as shocked as the upper-class gay sophisticates that Fox has subsequently fallen in with.

It is here that Fassbinder begins to expose the dark heart of his story, as these characters descend on the course and immature Fox and begin to force their own ideals and ideologies on him... even going so far as to belittle him in front of his old friends who still hang out in the same dimly-lit, low-rent cabaret club as before. This is innocent enough, but when Fox takes up with Eugene, one of the key-characters in the upper-class gay milieu, Fassbinder pushes the melodrama to the next emotional level... destroying everything that Fox had always wanted and had finally achieved, leaving him as penniless, loveless and hopeless as he was when we first met him. Fassbinder doesn't sugarcoat his message here; with 'Fox' standing as one of the most depressing and hopeless films ever made (perhaps rivalled only by the director's own later film, In a Year with 13 Moons).

The mood of the film throughout is caustic and claustrophobic, with the director and his cinematographer Michael Ballhaus using tight, fragmented composition to separate the characters constantly. There's also a great deal of mirror symbolism, with Fassbinder getting at the notion of personal reflection and the idea of seeing beyond the façade (...whether the façade you put up to hide true feelings for others, or the façade that others present to you, etc). The use of colour and overall production design seems more drab and uninviting too; all adding to the general mood of oppression and spiralling despair so central to the script. With this film, Fassbinder seems to have an important message to convey about the class system, and how the working class will always be seen as inferior to those born with a silver spoon in their mouths, even if they eventually attain to the same social and financial level as them!! It is, on the one hand, a relationship drama, but is a relationship drama entirely tied to the idea of class exploitation. One shouldn't let the use of homosexuality deter them from watching the film, as this is really secondary to the ideas discussed above (and yes, the film does feature some mild love scenes and frontal male nudity... but it's hardly Sebatianne or Taxi Zum Klo!!), with Fassbinder much more concerned with the idea of abuse in the face of love.

The central performance by Fassbinder here is a real revelation, as he manages to make Fox seem real and sympathetic... never the tragic or pathetic figure that he could have become in the hands of certain other filmmakers. He begins the film confident, arrogant and to some extent happy with the life he has been leading... but ends up a broken shell, with no money, no friends and no hope. I won't go in to too much detail surrounding the ending, though, needless to say, it's like the last kick to the guts when you're already at you're lowest point; with the director taking his melodrama beyond the required level of despair and into something much more heart wrenching. It obviously won't be to everyone's taste, with the idea of spiralling desperation and depression sure to put a lot of people off... but it's no less a powerful film, one of the many masterpieces that Fassbinder directed before his untimely death in 1982.

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