Fassbinder's First Feature Film: Love is as Cold as Death

"Nihilistic" is a word that often occurs in the vicinity of the prolific, short-lived German stage and screen director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-82) and definitely applies to his first feature film, "Liebe ist kälter als der Tod" (Love Is As Cold As Death, 1969). It opens with dedication to some French directors -not the ones might guess from the look of the movie, Godard and Truffaut - but Chabrol and Rohmer. Probably the dedication was a provocation, though the violence and nihilism does fit with Chabrol's body of work.

Because, I think, the central characters are a young woman and two young man, some have seen affinities with Godard's 1964 "Bande à part" (Band of Outsiders, 1964), but the three French youth in that were filled with joie de vivre and having good times. I don't recall a single smile from any of the three German youths: Fassbinder himself, playing Franz, the pimp for Johanna (Hanna Schygulla), and killer/robber Bruno (Ulli Lommel) wearing a fedora and trench coat that were even more anachronistic in 1969 than what looks to me to be the model, Alain Delon's hitman in Melville's "Le samouraï" (1967).

At the start of the movie, Franz is being roughed up for refusing to join the local (Munich) criminal syndicate. I'm not sure whether Bruno has a contract to kill Franz. I think so, but he falls in with Franz and Johanna, buying guns, and using one on a Turk who believes Franz killed his brother... and on a 19-year-old waitress who witnesses the slaying. Later, there is a shootout outside a bank Bruno wants to ride (with Franz as getaway driver and Johanna off in a phone booth when the robbery should be going on), car chase, and the shooting of a motorcycle policeman. Plus slaying of one or two of Johanna's customers, a ludicrous corpse disposal, and lots of shoplifting which was, I think, supposed by Fassbinder to be amusing. And gratuitous nudity for Schygulla (but, alas, not for Lommel; both, btw, had been working in Fassbinder's Anti-Theater company and made many more movies with Fassbinder). Well, maybe not gratuitous, since the hooker minidresses make her look worse than I've seen her look in any other movie.

Though many unpleasant things happen, I don't regard them as making a "plot." The characters are all ciphers. Franz is stubborn and belligerent. There is no indication that either Franz or Bruno or Johanna feel or think anything about what they do or the corpses that result.

The room in which Johanna plies her trade is unadorned. In one scene, the three walk and walk and walk, wordlessly, down a country road.

The camera wielding by Dietrich Lohmann (Ludwig - Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König; a number of other Fassbinder movies, including "Effi Briest") is very French New Wave (Raoul Coutard-inspired) is stylish. Not nourish, because almost the entire movie takes place during the day, and sometimes moving the camera for the sake of moving the camera... but Lohmann's work is the only plus I could find in the alienating movie about alienated young Germans, ca. 1969.


Fassbinder, smoking and surly, is in front of the camera (if less memorably than in "The Merchant of Four Seasons" and "Fox and His Friends" later on), and even for someone who is far from being a Fassbinder admirer, there is interest in seeing his first feature film (not enough to justify even 88 minutes, however, IMHO. It does suggest that he hatched fully formed... and terminally alienated. Not as chicly as Godard's debut (also a deconstruction of gangster movies), "À bout de souffle" (Breathless, 1960), though with a similar alternation of jumpcuts and long takes, including protracted close-ups of Lommel's inexpressive (though handsome) face.