Description:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder turned to color for his fourth film, a bleak portrait of middle-class banality. Kurt Raab, the plump, baby-faced art director usually cast as the director's most pathetic characters, stars as Herr R., a seemingly successful middle-class professional and happily married family man who stumbles through life like a grinning zombie. As one might guess from the title, Herr R. (an appropriately vague, undistinguished character that Fassbinder leaves unnamed to better stand in for a German everyman) is about to go over the edge, and the film shows us why in relentless, numbing detail. At work he's an insignifi
Rainer Werner Fassbinder turned to color for his fourth film, a bleak portrait of middle-class banality. Kurt Raab, the plump, baby-faced art director usually cast as the director's most pathetic characters, stars as Herr R., a seemingly successful middle-class professional and happily married family man who stumbles through life like a grinning zombie. As one might guess from the title, Herr R. (an appropriately vague, undistinguished character that Fassbinder leaves unnamed to better stand in for a German everyman) is about to go over the edge, and the film shows us why in relentless, numbing detail. At work he's an insignificant figure of ridicule; at home he escapes into endless hours of TV when not killing time with empty small talk (largely improvised by the cast), and he soon slips into a listless depression compounded by constant headaches. Fassbinder and codirector Michael Fengler don't make the experience easy for us. The film is as purposely banal as the chatty droning of the soundtrack, shot in a hypernaturalistic approach with a palette of muddy, dull colors that give the picture the quality of a faded Polaroid. There's a genius to the gesture, and the film marches inexorably to a harrowing climax, but it's not for all tastes. Even Fassbinder fans admit that this is a tough film to get through. --Sean Axmaker
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Manufacturer: Fantoma
Release date: 30 May 2006
Number of discs: 1
EAN: 0695026703723 UPC: 695026703723
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