Enfant Terrible, directed by Oskar Roehler, is a biopic on the iconoclastic director of New German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. While the film benefits greatly from inspired visuals and a brashly committed performance from Oliver Masucci as Fassbinder, ultimately it is an uneven and only partially successful attempt in capturing the turbulent life of one of the greatest post-war European artists.
Roehler doesn’t take any major risks with the chronology of the biopic as he sets the scene for Fassbinder’s eventual cinematic manifesto. We first see Fassbinder as a young man and part of the Munich Action-Theater in the 1960s. The 52-year old Massuci, adorned in the director’s trademark attire of a leather jacket and horn-rimmed glasses, fag pursed between his lips, eerily captures the physicality of the director, if not his tender age. It is already evident that the theatre is not enough for this restless agitator who is shown spraying the audience with water during a performance. Invigorated by cinema’s ability to make stories about people dreaming and those dreams being shattered (”theatre can’t do that,” he says early on, “…only cinema can”), he embarks on the shooting of his first film, 1969’s Love is Colder Than Death.
This stark, Godard-inspired noir was shot in black and white, but Fassbinder would eventually go on to embrace Sirkian Technicolour and finally, in his last film Querelle, adopt visuals which can only be described as a queer fantasia with its stylised dockyard set, psychedelic lighting and fetish wear. The heightened unreality of Markus Schütz’s art direction in Enfant Terrible is an homage to the queered lighting and artificial sets of this misunderstood Jean Genet adaptation.
The film is also somewhat of a cinephile tour for devotees; we catch brief glimpses of the filming of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Veronika Voss and Querelle, and encounters with Jack Palance and Andy Warhol. Fassbinder was responsible for giving career-defining roles to actresses such as Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, and Hanna Schygulla, but the women in his life get short-shrift, only featured on the periphery, and sometimes even under pseudonyms.
The focus here is less on Fassbinder as a filmmaker and more on his excesses with drugs and alcohol, the freedoms afforded by pre-AIDs hedonism, his violent outbursts and casually cruel sadism towards his crew, and his troubled relationships with his (mainly foreign) lovers Günther Kaufmann (Michael Klammer) and El Hedi ben Salem (Erdal Yildiz). These men were leads in his life and in his art and Fassbinder, who was openly bisexual or ‘everything but mainly gay’, lustily revels in their objectification on and off camera. Salem would go on to star in arguably Fassbinder’s greatest film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and you only need to witness his filmography to see how porous the line is between his life and work, populated with characters who flirt with fatalism or innocents corrupted by the wickedness of others. It’s no wonder that Roehler begins the film with a lyric from the song sung by Jean Moreaux’s brothel-keeper in Querelle — “Each man kills the thing he loves”.
Even after the critical success of The Marriage of Maria Braun, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1979, Fassbinder was still striving to make his masterpiece and see his name amongst the likes of his idols: Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, and Douglas Sirk. Unfortunately, spending two hours in his company begins to get exhausting and tediously repetitive as he descends into barbiturate and cocaine fuelled binges, culminating in his death at the age of 37 in 1982. Enfant Terrible offers no deeper insight about Fassbinder that you wouldn’t be able to gather from watching Fox and his Friends or The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. Maybe the constraints of a tidy biopic is too limited and well-behaved to capture the monstrousness and brilliance of his bruising, messily provocative art.
