Enfant Terrible *** (2020, Oliver Masucci, Hary Prinz, Katja Riemann) – Classic Movie Review 11,054

Simply put, director Oskar Roehler’s 2020’s biographical drama Enfant Terrible is a good film of a bad man and a good director. It is a provocative, challenging, depressing film.

Oliver Masucci is strikingly excellent as iconic Seventies German New Wave film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, apparently a man no one in their right mind should have come near to. This gives Enfant Terrible a headache. How do you make a film about Fassbinder that people can watch if it is a relentless, unforgiving warts and warts portrait? Enfant Terrible is very hard to watch, impossible probably for audiences who know little of Fassbinder and his films.

It is startlingly stylised, following the look of a Fassbinder film, and startlingly stylish too, with unreal studio sets and lighting. It seems a faultless re-creation of its time and place, one in which a man like Fassbinder could turn out film after film, many of them remarkable, while being unbelievably sadistic and abusive to friends, lovers and colleagues. He has a place in heaven for his films and hell for his behaviour.

Fassbinder meets Andy Warhol.

The film captures this exactly, though it is hard to tell what points it wants to make. Maybe none, and that is okay. If only the story that follows Fassbinder’s moral and physical decay to an early grave at 37 it has to tell were more uplifting. It is a tour-de-force downer, an accurate reflection of its wild, self-destructive subject and abrasive films. It could even be accused of being antigay, like Fassbinder was by his detractors in his lifetime. Hilariously, Fassbinder meets Andy Warhol and seriously says to him in English: ‘You have to go where it hurts. I always go where it hurts. In life and in films.’

The screenplay is by Klaus Richter, from a story by Klaus Richter Oskar Roehler. There is a lot of clarity in the tricky telling of a decade-or-so narrative, and it keeps motoring and compelling for its unfashionably long 134 minutes. Naturally it is a bit of a one-man show, but Hary Prinz as Kurt Raab, Katja Riemann as Gudrun and Erdal Yildiz as El Hedi ben Salem also impress.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder died of a drug overdose on June 10, 1982 in Munich, Bavaria, West Germany. His unfinished script for a film about Rosa Luxemburg was next to him. His first feature length film Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) was greeted by catcalls at the Berlin Film Festival. Oskar Roehler says this is his favorite Fassbinder movie.

Enfant Terrible premiered at the Hamburg Film Festival on 24 September 2020 and screened at the BFI Flare London LGBTQ+ Film Festival from 17 March 2021.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,054

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com