Vitus Zeplichal, a new member to Fassbinder's company of players in his first and only leading role for the director, plays Peter, a bricklayer from a small Bavarian town. His mother (Erni Mangold) is cold and disapproving and his father (Alexander Allerson) inattentive and unwilling to stand up to his wife, and even after single-handedly building them a house (on his days off from a full-time job) he fails to win their affection. He marries Erika (Elke Aberle), a young pharmacy assistant, and impulsively moves to Munich to start a new life in the booming economy of the big city. He's the devoted son, the attentive husband and the dedicated worker, but he works himself to exhaustion and ill-health trying to prove his love to Erika with the trappings of middle-class affluence and spirals into crippling debt. "I'd rather work myself to death than beg," he explains to Erika after she suggests he ask his father for money, which would be as good as admitting that he's failure. The moment his confidence is shaken, he buys another present for his wife and spends himself back into debt, until the pressure is so great that he finally, inevitably cracks. Interspersed with his story are flashbacks to his childhood and his courtship with Erika and interviews between Peter and a social worker.
Peter becomes a stand-in for the director's own story, refracted through the ordeal of a young man who is still haunted by the emotional neglect and constant disapproval of his parents. The director often spoke the lack of love growing up and as he became successful as a director, he was famous for lavishing expensive presents on his lovers. While it's an exaggeration to say that slim, boyishly mopey Zeplichal looks like the chubby Fassbinder, there is a vague resemblance in the prominent nose, full face and desperate eyes that recall the Fassbinder of Fox and his Friends. [It should also be noted that while Fassbinder identified with the victims of his films, the innocents exploited by everyone around them, in real life Fassbinder was generally the one doing the exploiting, quickly falling in and out of infatuations, playing mind-games with his lovers and often cruelly abandoning them.] And while there is a streak of social commentary in the working class aspiration to middle class affluence and the culture of debt that hangs over our heroes, as well as dialogue that acknowledges the construction company's continued exploitation of Peter's work ethic, this is less about society and economics than personal and family psychology. Possessions aren't a substitution for values, they are simply the way Peter has been taught to show his love in a childhood where love and affection were withheld.
Originally made for German television, I Only Want You to Love Me was made in the midst of his most prolific period. It was one of five films he shot in 1975. While his feature films were becoming more stylistically dense and baroque, this was shot with a stripped-down aesthetic for the small screen. The images are uncluttered, often stark, the better to foreground the physical divide (and emotional disconnection) between the characters and the isolation of Peter. It's telling that the most intimate moment in the film, as Peter and Erika stand naked in front of one another before they make love for the first time, is carved up with a mirror that Fassbinder uses to reflect Peter so that the would-be lovers aren't even facing each other on screen. The exception to the spare settings is the marriage apartment that Peter fills with a clutter of ersatz class and garishly clashing styles that looks like a pretender's attempt to buy the trappings of middle-class affluence. The effect isn't for satire as much as commentary on a man who looks to possessions to prove his sense of worth, not even noticing that none of it is important to his wife. The graceful camerawork (by Fassbinder regular Michael Ballhaus) is as fluid as ever, subtly prowling through the small sets and often lonely locations and constantly readjusting the angle and the composition, not just to get a better angle but to acknowledge the shifting dynamics of the drama within the scene and continue to isolate Peter from the family groupings.
I Only Want You to Love Me is as downbeat as any film Fassbinder made--it's clear from the gloomy atmosphere and the constant disappointment and desperation of Peter that it isn't going to end well--but he clearly invested himself in the film. While other films of the period are more baroque and exaggerated, he brings a morose naturalism to the film even as creates an atmosphere of isolation through the performances. The family scenes are unsettling in that the parents barely acknowledge his presence unless he directly confronts them. Zeplichal has the hang-dog quality of a whipped dog constantly begging for another chance to prove his loyalty. There is a single-minded quality to the film in contrast to more ambitious and expansive productions like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Fox and his Friends (another of Fassbinder's more personal productions) and historical dramas like Effie Briest and The Marriage of Maria Braun, and it would be too depressing to endure of not for Fassbinder's engagement and empathy for Peter and the film's concern for his ordeal. It is a compelling and ultimately moving portrait of a man whose efforts to prove his love take a terrible toll.
The film was shot on 16mm for television broadcast. Olive's DVD is mastered from the 2010 restoration and presents the film in its original 4x3 TV format. The image is fine-looking throughout but for the initial credits sequence, which is soft and grainy with unstable color. It clears up immediately after this soft opening. Also features the hour-long retrospective documentary Of Love and Constraints: Speculations of Fassbinders's I Only Want You To Love Me, directed by Robert Fischer in 2010 at the time of the film's restoration. The feature and the documentary are both in German with English subtitles.
For more information about I Only Want You to Love Me, visit Olive Films. To order I Only Want You to Love Me, go to TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
