handmade_blade From the opening strains of lilting carnival music, set against a colorful fairground swarming with people, there's no doubt about Fassbinder's goal in this film: To show the insanity and the depravity of the world in all its hectic disgrace. This extended metaphor smoothly gives way to the story, as Klaus, Fox's manager and boyfriend, is arrested, we meet Fox's drunken sister, Fox meets Max, Fox wins the lottery and Fox makes his notorious friends. All these events happen in rapid succession, but when the plot slows down a little Fox has a new lover: Eugen, a slick, highbrow conman. Fox doesn't realize it at the time, but when he utters the words "There's no one that can't be had" Eugen agrees completely, albeit in silence. Eugen proceeds to take Fox on a ride, milking him for money to save his father's failing company, a posh apartment and the furniture for it, fancy clothes, a vacation to Morocco and a car. Fox loses everything and kills himself, but that's to be expected in a Fassbinder film.The irony in the U.S. title, Fox and His Friends is two-fold. His old friends, the ones who hang out in the bar he frequents, the ones who are down to earth and genuine, are the same ones he no longer has any use for. His new friends, the ones who are well cultured, the ones who make fun of him behind his back and criticize him to his face, the ones who fleece him for every penny he has, are the ones he can't get himself away from. The lives of Fox's friends from both sides get tangled together as they all watch Fox sink lower and lower and do nothing to help him. Fox and His Friends is a good enough title for this film, but the original title Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fist Fight of Freedom in English) is much more telling. Fox wants to be happy, and happiness is freedom, but he is far too vulnerable and trusting to attain either in the world he's living in. A world where no one is trustworthy and, worse than that, everyone is amoral and selfish. The characters in this movie are all involved a metaphorical fist fight where only the strong survive, where only those who are willing to connive, cheat, trick and steal are going to come out on top.Just like in life, no one in this film is entirely sympathetic, once you get to know them. Fox is the most likable character, but even he has questionable morals. This aspect of the film is highlighted in Fox and Eugen's first conversation where Fox declares that there are three types of people in the world: Those who are clean, those who wash and those who stink no matter how much they wash themselves. He goes on to say that the latter is okay because some people like a little stink. This declaration of humanity sums up what Fassbinder is trying to say in this film and many more. The statement is matched by the visual fragmentation of the characters, who, rarely shown in the whole, are instead fragmented by stray objects, windowpanes or mirrors. The scenes of the fair, the boutiques, the bars and Morocco are all lies as Fassbinder lays these colorful settings under truth after truth about the drab and mundane world in which we live. In the end, Max and Karl, representing the best of each of Fox's groups of friends, find Fox dead from doctor prescribed sleeping pills in a subway station and decide to leave him there because they don't want to get involved.At first it seems that Fassbinder has nothing good to say about human nature. That people are bad and Fox, the world weary victim, is an exception to the rule. But if Fox is an exception, couldn't there be other exceptions too? Surely Fox isn't one of a kind. After all, he's not a very exceptional person. Ultimately the message here is bittersweet, that one can be happy, but they have to fight for it with their life. Fox takes it one step further and sacrifices his life for happiness. Or rather, because of his lack of it in life.

jzappa Fox and His Friends, one of Fassbinder's favorites among his work, and my first experience seeing a film by the astonishingly prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder, carries most of its appeal in the sensitive art of coalescing the out of the ordinary and the commonplace. In the world of Fox and His Friends, gay men vastly outnumber the straight people much in the same way most mainstream films have an inverted social perspective.Fassbinder himself takes the plum lead, a naive young working-class hustler who wins the lottery and in next to no time find himself, and his lottery spoils, adopted by Munich's gay social circle. He is one of only two directors of whom I know who have cast themselves in roles that incidentally bare their dangling genitals, as if the preceding crotch shot is not rousing enough. (The other is Guy Maddin.)This West German drama gives the impression of being about a relationship between Fassbinder's cool, masculine young punk and the outwardly amiable bourgeois son of a factory owner, but it slowly begins to head for a two-way street of class consciousness.The factory owner, we find out, is about to go out of business. The son hopes to save the company. One way out might be to fleece the effortlessly buttered up lottery winner out of his wealth, possibly using love as an excuse.Fassbinder is terrific in his apparently complete creative control with scenes in which dialogue beyond words, subtext is unthinkable, and direct actions are impossible. This knack blossoms in the film's most thought-provoking scenes, counting a skillfully multifaceted dinner scene. The factory owner's son brings Fassbinder home to meet his parents, and it becomes distressingly evident that the only real reason sexuality is not an issue with them is because money is, though this is not implied through their actions, but their son's.This moving piece of blatant ruthlessness, which excludes all life not within the particular intentions of its co-writer-producer-director-star, moves in and out of the now timeworn gay demiworld that has been John Rechy's atmospheric mainstay: Its bars with retro rock and roll on the jukebox and queens for barflies, its revelries, its maneuverings. And this melodrama's indications progressively grow to be sadly unmistakable, that Fox is the prey of the capitalist social order that so swiftly made him well-off, duped by "friendships" for which he doesn't even understand that he's picking up the tab.

desperateliving I'm continually blown away with Fassbinder. And it's all the more affecting because, like all great artists, he challenges your conceptions and forces you to have a new experience. We have to fight our way through his movie, critiquing everything we see. Fox is sure he will win the lottery. Today will be the day. And, he does. Like the ending of "Ordet," this is a cliché embraced, but why? Fassbinder is far too intelligent and original a talent to be conventional without a reason. (In fact, in a regular movie Fox's lottery win would be a thrilling set-piece, sitting in front of a TV screen in a living room, with some dying family member in a hospital bed awaiting money for treatment. Here, we don't even see the win.) Of course the lottery win is a set-up for the way money affects a relationship, especially in gay culture. Basically, Fassbinder is truth. There's a much more honest depiction of factory work here than in, say, von Trier's later films, where he dotes on the "common" man (just as often, woman) as if a simpleton that we should feel sorry for (I doubt they feel sorry for themselves; von Trier just obliges us to feel that way on their behalf). The mistakes made here are by the controllers of the factory -- it's Fox's scheming lover's father who gets the business bankrupt, and it's Fox, after he lends his lover money to get them out of debt, who screws up the printing. But Fox isn't humiliated by his mistake, whereas a blind, helpless Bjork in "Dancer in the Dark" is made to be a pitiable object. (To be fair, both Fassbinder and von Trier have a tendency to wallow in the miserable.) Fassbinder focuses his film mainly on the class barrier -- Fox's lover makes insulting comments to him regarding proper manners -- but he's also giving us a kind of gay relationship film noir -- we see ex-lovers kissing (in a ceiling mirror!) behind current lovers' backs, and money corruption plays a large part in the film. (Fox's lover is excellent in his role; he never plays a character who's sole purpose for living is to plot in a corner about how he'll be evil today.) And Fassbinder's view of society as something that destroys people is very noirish (Fox isn't completely in the dark; he does understand he's being used as it's happening). But to be sure, Fassbinder is also detailing the upper-class homosexual in a very critical way; but I think he could have done much more exposing the shallowness of gay culture. (He mainly treats Fox's lover and his ex-/secret lover with peeking-through-keyhole disdain, no doubt partly from Fox's perspective, but I find that somewhat childish and not terribly interesting. It's the view of someone who's been screwed over and feels depressed about it, not someone intent on exposing why people are corrupt, and how.) You don't know quite how to feel about this; in a way Fassbinder is very brave -- he casts himself in an incredibly unromantic role. And at the same time it's interesting because, while Fassbinder doesn't seem too pleased with the superficial manner of the gays whose eyes immediately fixate on money and looks, his own film features an abundance of male nudity early on, of young, very attractive boys that Fox himself is quite attracted to.On a more technical aspect, there are plenty of interesting shots, of reflections, or obscurities, or of the backs of heads or bodies; one particularly stand-out scene is the one where Fox and his lover are vacationing in Morocco and cruise for a man, and when in a taxi with him the camera observes the festival around them while we listen to their discussion. (The man they pick up is Ali from "Fear Eats the Soul," and many of Fassbinder's stable appear in the film. The fact that it's Ali playing a Moroccan -- albeit, one that's ostensibly gay, so it may not in fact be Ali -- gives the film a self-referential bent, though it's never gimmicky; rather, a continuous web of obsessions; there is a comment on racism inputted in this scene, as well.) The ending of the film is a bit too cruel and heavy-handed, though the pessimist in me appreciates it, the part of me that believes society is a pitiless social system out to wreck anything with a pureness of soul. 9/10

tresdodge A homosexual fair ground performer Franz Fox wins the lottery and is soon seduced by an upper class man Eugen who appears to be after only one thing, Franz's money.Not a bad film, just a bit long and at times rather dreary. There is not much of a story to it but there are numerous interesting characters along the way that Fox encounters.The hideous character of Eugen is played rather well by Peter Chatel, a snob who looks down his nose at the working class Fox. In addition, Max (played by Karlheinz Bohm of 'Peeping Tom' fame),plays the older man who seems to care for Fox to some extent. Rainer Fassbinder plays Fox very well and one cannot help feeling sorry for Fox who has fallen for a sneaky and deceitful man. An OK film, a little trippy at times but not recommended particularly highly by this viewer.