In one of his few films to explore the relationships between children and parents, Fassbinder takes his characters to a large country house in Franconia. Here, 12-year-old crippled Angela forces her parents, their lovers, her governess and the housekeeper and her son to take part in a malicious truth game which allows everyone to inflict deadly wounds on the others without taking a weapon into their hands. It is Angela’s revenge for being rejected by her parents, particularly by her mother, from the moment she became a cripple. The pressure Angela puts on her parents also affects the relations between the parents and their respective lovers who are unexpectedly drawn into this on-going family war.
Fassbinder’s staging of this war is highly controlled and played out in an intricate choreography that has the characters and the camera constantly moving. Complicated mirror shots as well as distortions and refractions of the actor’s faces when filmed through two glass vitrines filled with bottles create the visual equivalents of the characters’ duplicity and changing emotional affiliations.
A similar heightened formal rigour can be detected in Béla Tarr’s Almanac of a Fall where it is also employed to depict the belligerent and spiteful interactions among the inhabitants of a run-down mansion.
West Germany, 1977, colour, 86 mins. With English subtitles. Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With Anna Karina, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira.
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