Fox and his Friends (Freedom’s Law of the Jungle) (Faustrecht der Freiheit) (1975)

LGBT Cinema are movies that either deal with LGBT topics or are concerned with the lives of people inside the LGBT community.   Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s, “Fox and his Friends”, is the latter of those two types of movies.    It is also one of the best of its kind.     Dealing with a melodramatic story of love and betrayal, the movie works more as a conflict between the class cultures in Germany than anything else.    By the time the movie ends, I was so caught up in the story, that the fact that it is set entirely within the German LGBT community in the 1970s, became an almost unnoticeable aspect of the film.    

“Fox and his Friends” is a tragedy that concerns the rise and fall of one Franz Bieberkopf (Fassbinder himself who proves that he was no slouch when it came to acting).   Franz works in a carnival under the synonym of, “Fox the talking head”, and the movie opens as the creator of this carnival act, who is also Franz’s lover, is arrested for tax evasion, leaving France unemployed.    France is a lottery addict who needs to consistently purchase lottery tickets each week and when his last bit of cash is stolen, he reverts to prostitution so that he can buy the current week’s ticket.    Due to time constraints, he still needs to steal money to buy his ticket and does that at a local florist.      Franz is introduced as Fox by his well to do trick Max (Karlheinz Bohm).     It turns out that the lottery ticket he purchased was the winning ticket with a 600,000 German Mark prize.      One of Max’s friends is Eugen (Peter Chatel) who, while initially showing his disgust at Franz’s lower-class sensibilities, changes his attitude once he realizes that France won the lottery.     By seducing France, Eugen uses deceit and dishonesty, and works to psychologically destroy Franz’s self-esteem, taking advantage of his kindness in attempting to slyly steal all his newfound wealth.  

Once France and Eugen are a couple, Eugen will slowly and with cold intent work to first make France feel like he is entering an equal world within Eugen’s own world of money and manners, while at the same time making him feel inept at every turn.   This emotional manipulation was very clear to me from the beginning, which made it equally sad to watch how Franz did not realize what was happening before it was too late.    Interestingly, when they initially meet, Franz is shown as a confident free soul, as if he is in control of the situation.  His slow sad transformation into a victim was utterly believable.   The fact that I saw it coming a mile away did not ruin the authenticity, as Franz’s lack of intelligence was never in question.   Within this relationship, Fassbinder gives an insightful critique of German society that differentiates people through class and money.   Love, which is the strongest of emotions, gets purchased here for money.    Franz has no qualms about prostituting himself when he is poor, which is a characteristic of his that Eugen takes full advantage of.  Franz is now more than willing to use his money to attain what he once thought was an unattainable love and lifestyle, while at the same time, it is Eugen who becomes the prostitute.   Love, social standing and money have never been more cynically interwoven than how they are portrayed in this movie.

It is quite interesting that, as a very liberal and freely showing LGBT film, “Fox and his friends”, is in a way a little conservative with its view on the German LGBT community in the early 70s, all the while retaining a universal story of love and betrayal.    There are depictions of bathroom sex, bath houses, and promiscuity, yet the story is so beautifully laid out and expressed, that the background of where it takes place becomes less significant.    

Similar to many of Fassbinder’s movies, “Fox and his Friends” revolves most of its drama within closed interiors that feel almost prison-like to its characters.    When Franz purchases a fancy apartment, he is made to feel immediately like an uninvited guest, through the personality of Eugen, who controls not only the living schedule of the flat, but also its complete design.   It would be made quite clear to Franz that his lower-class sensibilities would not allow him to make decisions in his new life.   He becomes a prisoner in the short-term luxury created by his sudden and unexpected wealth.   I remember being struck by stories of suddenly successful athletes who become extremely wealthy and just as quickly lose their wealth to others.   “Fox and his Friends” is a great example of this exact repeated social phenomenon.  

Other than Franz’s poor alcoholic sister and some boring spouses, who are married for money, all the characters in the movie belong to the LGBT community, making “Fox and his Friends” not only a terrific melodrama, but also a great example that, no matter who you are, we as human beings are pretty much all the same.      Not only is that a great message, but the movie it also comes from is an excellent slice of life from post-war Germany.  

Mirror (Zerkalo) (1975)

In 2011 after attending a showing of Terrence Malick’s, “The Tree of Life”, I was awe-struck at thinking that I had just watched something not only deeply personal, but very original.     As I finished viewing Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 film, “Mirror”, I understood that while Malick’s movie is still great, it was not as original as I initially thought. “Mirror” is one of the most unconventional movies that I have ever seen, working in essence as a flow within the memory and life of its main character.   A character that most people attribute to being Tarkovsky himself.  

“Mirror”, follows the life of one Alexei (Oleg Yankovsky plays the adult version), who is a man reflecting on his own life and Russian history.    The movie spans a pre-war period in the 30s, when Alexei was a young boy, a period during the war in the 40s when he was an adolescent and a period in the late 60s when he was a divorced adult with an adolescent son.    The movie moves freely between these time periods without linear or conventional logic to tie them together.    In addition, the movie’s cinematography uses elegant color, stark black and white photography, slow-motion dream sequences and historical black and white newsreel footage throughout the movie.   Tarkovsky blends these different visual styles throughout the different time frames in the movie.    Not all the 1930s scenes are filmed in Black and White as not all the more modern period scenes are filmed in color.  The blend is sporadic and seemingly without reason.     This also results in a spellbinding visual experience.

Tarkovsky’s use of the same actress to play both his mother and his ex-wife adds to the feeling I had of pure emotion while watching the movie.       The blend of characters played by the same person and through different time periods often happens throughout the film.   In addition, these same characters appear in the elegant dream-like sequences that include a view of the mother post-shower sequence that gives her a ghost-like appearance while a shower ceiling collapses, that is repeated within another dream-like scene that shows her levitating above a bed.  

The movie also makes use of the same actor to take on the role of Alexie as an adolescent during wartime and his son during the more modern sequences.    Initially, this free-flowing style combined with no direct artistic differentiation of the time periods resulted in my getting confused as to which period and sometimes character I am watching.   Eventually, the deep emotional images flowed easily, and I was able to follow not only specific characters but also their emotional depictions.   

The interspersal of the historical newsreel footage, while initially seeming out of place, eventually gave me a feeling of context for Alexei or Tarkovsky himself and the world in which he exists.    One of the more startling of these scenes is pictures of Russian soldiers wading through water and mud on their way to the front during World War II.  Facing almost certain death, their onward determined movements are enlightening.   Especially when placed within the context of this eclectic movie of memoir and feelings.   The footage of nuclear bomb explosions also serves as a context for the world in which Tarkovsky lives.   

I believe that Tarkovsky in making the movie, was trying hard to interpret his memories.   These are sometimes memories of actual events, or just feelings and even dreams.     Is there a correlation between the scenes filmed in color and those in Black and White?  I am sure there is, but it would take countless repeated viewings to decipher this.    Instead, these smooth changes of style felt like emotional surges of visual spender to me.    I was awe-struck and totally captivated by the sheer visuals shown in the movie.    

As for mirrors, there are plenty of them throughout the film and each time a character looks into one, the gaze is deep in thought.    In many cases, the mirror serves as a trigger to another thought or period.   If this is a movie about the memories of Tarkovsky then the mirror serves as its window.    The look into a mirror is the view into a memory and that is how I felt while watching this fascinating film.  

I also felt a lot of metaphysical energy in many scenes.   The fast motion depiction of vapor evaporating from a tabletop to the natural falling of rain, the blazing of a bonfire and nature’s natural reaction to a blowing wind.    I recalled windblown blades of grass from Malick’s film and here we are shown almost purposeful movements of golden blades of wheat made by a sudden wind burst.     All these are not only beautiful to behold but also gave me an emotional feeling of longing.   Tarkovsky seems to be telling me that our world and nature are triggers for our memories.  

Andrei Tarkovsky’s, “Mirror”, is one of the most original motion pictures I have ever seen.  It is a stunning depiction of one man’s memory that is awe-inspiring and heart-rendering without telling a linear story.   Like a painting by great artists or a symphony by one of the music giants. It is a movie of artistic beauty that is a treasure to behold.