Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Oskar Roehler
Starring: Oliver Masucci, Hary Prinz, Katja Riemann, Felix Hellmann
My main complaint with biopics is how dull they tend to be. Artifice is
always more exciting than reality, surely that is why art exists? And as
narratives which are necessarily tied to the unstructured longueurs of
‘real life’, biopics which marshal several subjectively representative
incidents into a causal, palatable plotline seem beside the point. Imagine
a biopic about Quentin Tarantino (man works in video store) or Scorsese
(kid has asthma)! Oskar Roehler (director) and
Klaus Richter’s (writer) Enfant Terrible, however, is a biopic of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. God Fassbinder. The
producer of 44 films and television dramas in 15 years, notwithstanding
the many plays he directed for theatre and the various essays he penned at
the same time. You’d think he’d be too busy with making stuff to be
getting on with the business of life, but no. Various deeply felt
relationships (both male and female) were loved and lost, notoriety in the
German press abounded, and a persistent excitement of controversy
surrounded Fassbinder (conservatives were shocked by the content of his
films, while certain gay audiences were likewise offended by the
representation: Fassbinder DGAF and delighted in provocation). Bohemian,
driven, obsessed, acutely fecund; he is everyone’s Platonic ideal of a
film director. All of this before dying, at 37, in the most Fassbinder way
imaginable: overdosing on cocaine and barbiturates. Biopic? This is the
stuff of legend.
Roehler and Richter’s film is a potted history of Fassbinder’s work on his
productions and his processes of creativity, with the maestro’s
relationships providing a narrative through line. This is the correct
approach to representing the director, as with his haphazard habit of
falling in love with some bloke or another and working it so they could be
cast in his films (regardless of whether they had an acting background or
not) life and art were inextricably entwined with Fassbinder.
Hindsight is the blight of all biography, so perhaps inescapably there is
a frenzied sense of doom to the pacing of Enfant Terrible as
Rainer picks up muses Günther Kaufmann (Michael Klammer), Peer
Raben (Markus Hering) and the ill-fated El Hedi ben Salem (Erdal Yildiz, playing a person who, when he broke up with Fassbinder, ended up
stabbing three people and having to be smuggled out of Germany by Rainer
and pals: you just don’t get that level of thrilling outlaw energy with
other filmmakers), and gets fucked, smashed and invariably heartbroken.
As Fassbinder, Oliver Masucci is, of course, amazing. He is the
model of Rainer, and imbues his character with a sweltering, mercurial
energy. He is compulsively watchable, playing Fassbinder as someone who is
arrogant, cannily aware of his own mythology- prone to one liners such as
‘this whole life is a risk’- but also fatally vulnerable (exactly like, I
suppose, a terrible child would behave).
Contextualizing the performance, the mise-en-scene of the film is suitably
synthetic and stagey, with poppy colours and paper sets striking a balance
between vivid pantone and imagery, and a visual homage to the static
camera and theatricality of Fassbinder’s earlier films. There is something
decidedly claustrophobic about the storytelling, with Masucci stomping the
sets like a caged animal, furious with lust and creativity, appetites that
lead to his recurring isolation.
Although the domestic abuse of Irm Hermann is skirted over, this is no
hagiography. Fassbinder seems like an absolute nightmare to hang out with.
Enfant Terrible strives to explore this volatile
personality, and the relation between art and artist. In contrast to a
sequence where idealised anal sex is breathtakingly filmed by Fassbinder,
we see the director on the business end of an irl bumming, the camera
close up on his face. He looks nonplussed, as if he isn’t enjoying the
sex, as if the procurement of it, much the same way as filmmaking, is
something he is naturally compelled to do, in the same way that dogs bark
or fish swim.
This idea is central to Enfant Terrible, that experiencing and representing human existence in all forms is what
the artist helplessly does (it helps that the film presents pre-AIDS
cruising as darkly thrilling and in itself an aestheticized scene, with
its leather coding and baker boys) allowing the film a universal relevance
beyond the subject. Nonetheless, the film inexorably builds to the
production of Querelle, a fitting epitaph for the director, and substantiation that
Enfant Terrible’s heart belongs to Fassbinder and his audience, who find specific
meaning in the films’ sordid love stories and tentative violence: ‘I'm on
the brink of a shame from which no man ever rises. But only in that shame
will I find my everlasting peace’.
Enfant Terrible is on BFI Player
and in US cinemas now.