The story takes place in Munich, the city where Fassbinder started his career in live theater, first with a group called Action-Theater, where his colleagues included his future acting star Hanna Schygulla, and then with his own group, Anti-Theater, where he was able to experiment and grow as a writer, director, and actor. His early films often have strong theatrical elements, reflecting his belief that people are always performing socially constructed roles, even - or especially - when they think they're being most genuine and sincere. Like melodrama specialist Douglas Sirk, the Hollywood director he admired most, Fassbinder believed that a modern life is an imitation of life, continually shaped and influenced by cultural and historical forces.
The mobster-movie plot of Love Is Colder Than Death centers on Franz Walsch, a petty crook played by Fassbinder himself. A criminal boss is pushing him to join a syndicate and Franz repeatedly says no insisting that he works only for himself. Not taking no for an answer, the boss threatens to harm Franz's prostitute girlfriend, Johanna (Schygulla), and then sends a hoodlum named Bruno (Ulli Lomell) to keep the pressure up. Bruno's first task is finding Franz, who's hiding out because another thug wants to kill him. Before long all three main characters are entangled in a love triangle and a double murder.
As usual in his early films, Fassbinder cares less about the inner depths of the characters than about the unwavering arc of the narrative, which focuses with ruthless intensity on the efforts of Franz, Johanna and Bruno to carve out some tiny measure of contentment in a break urban environment that's uncaring and alienating at best, brutal and violent at worst. It's obvious from the beginning that all three are more or less doomed, and if the title doesn't make that clear enough the story's steady stream of crime, confusion and disloyalty leaves little doubt that things won't end particularly well for any of them, even though two of them do survive the messed-up robbery at the climax. What makes their exploits so fascinating is Fassbinder's ability to pare every aspect of the picture, from the framing of the images to the motivations of the characters, down to the barest essentials, making normally minor details stand out with surprising force and clarity. Less is truly more in Fassbinder's cinema, and no movie illustrates this better than his debut feature.
Sirk is one spirit presiding over Love Is Colder Than Death and another is Jean-Luc Godard, the French New Wave prodigy who helped revolutionize world cinema with his own debut feature, the 1960 crooks-and-cops drama Breathless, almost a decade earlier. The finale of Love Is Colder Than Death is a sort of Breathless redux - an impulsive betrayal, a sidewalk shooting, a sudden insult aimed at a lover - and there are also strong echoes of Godard's masterpiece My Life to Live (1962), which also deals with a prostitute, a pimp and small-time crime. (A superbly shot scene in a supermarket, where the camera glides along the aisles like a flawlessly steered shopping cart with eyes, might have inspired the supermarket scene of Godard's later Tout va bien in 1972.) More broadly, Love Is Colder Than Death oscillates between absurdity and tragedy in a very Godard-like manner.
All of that said, Fassbinder dedicates Love Is Colder Than Death not to Godard but to a pair of other French New Wave masterminds, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer, and to the politically and aesthetically radical filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub, who contributed some of the urban footage seen in the film. Love Is Colder Than Death also nods to Alfred Hitchcock - a character wants to buy glasses like the ones the cop in Psycho (1960) wears - and it's no coincidence that Chabrol and Rohmer had published a groundbreaking book on Hitchcock in 1957. A character called Erika Rohmer even shows up at one point.
Spotting cinema references like these is only one of the pleasures offered by Love Is Colder Than Death, which is vastly more enjoyable than its forbidding title might suggest. Fassbinder directed almost a dozen films over the next two years, launching the New German Cinema as well as his own rocket-propelled career, which continued at a furious pace until his untimely death in 1982 at just 37 years old. His view of the human condition was often pessimistic - Love Is Colder Than Death is the perfect Fassbinder title - but his social conscience and commitment to creative cinema remained intact even when his productions grew more ambitious and his audiences more diverse. Love Is Colder Than Death is a treat for Fassbinder connoisseurs and a fine introduction for newcomers to his work.
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Producers: Peer Raben, Thomas Schamoni
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematographer: Dietrich Lohmann
Art Direction: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ulla Lommel Film Editing: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Music: Peer Raben, Holger Münzer
With: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Franz Walsch), Ulla Lommel (Bruno), Hanna Schygulla (Johanna), Wil Rabenbauer (Jürgen), Kurt Raab (supervisor), Ingrid Caven (prostitute), Irm Hermann (sunglasses saleswoman)
BW-89m.
by David Sterritt
