Criterion Challenge 2023: RW Fassbinder stars in BAAL (1970)

 This is a film that I think could've only been interesting because it's Rainer Werner Fassbinder as the titular Baal, though it doesn't seem like he is the *only* performer who could ever rise to the depths of ugliness and moral decay that Baal represents (looking up Bertolt Brecht just now, a playwright I'm woefully unfamiliar with even though the term 'Brechtian device' is one I can understand and I'm sure I've admired in other circumstances, apparently there was another adaptation from Alan Clarke and David Bowie, which I really need to check out now).

What Fassbinder provides to the role, and this is largely for someone like myself who comes to this after devouring the majority of his prolific art, is a blurring of self and character; it's no secret to anyone who reads just a little about RWF that he could be a monster and tyrant to those around him (and, just as immediately and disarmingly, tender and loving and caring). He treated lovers like shit and could distance those around him greatly, getting close to some and then kicking them off into oblivion and cutting off contact, sometimes for years if not longer (ie till his untimely but not unexpected death).

So, to see him here, when he was younger and just off of creating his first features, it's incredible how much screen presence he brings to such a pretentious miscreant. One of the better scenes in the film is early on at a dinner party where it becomes clear quickly how Baal is not going to get very far in a professional life, as he is asked by editors and publishers to come and work for them and he just spouts poetic gobbledygook (and is not exactly mean, but he's thoroughly unpleasant, if that makes sense). From here, we are not following Baal on any kind of trajectory except downward, and yet for much of the movie he isn't doing anything, and neither are the people around him, that is compelling in shittiness. He's just a dirt-bag would-be poet jerk-off. And unfortunately Volker Schlondorff embraces the Brecht poetic dialog... to a fault.

I watched a bit of a conversation between Ethan Hawke and Jonathan Marc Sherman on the Criterion disc (both collaborated on a kind of adaptation of Baal), and the term "punk rock" was thrown around. That might very well be the case, but it's shallow and plodding punk rock, where there's no sense that within Schlondorff breaking the rules and conventions of filmmaking he's uncovering or looking for something new (the camera is largely roaming around for much of the time, with this oozy gauze around the sides of the lens, yuck).

And it's not that he is creating a distancing effect that was so associated with Brecht, on the contrary for much of this he'# using hand-held and an almost aggressive in-your-face mis en scene (except for a moment where Baal does a sexual assault and the cameraperson keeps backing up as the action is about to get horrible). But just because you are successful in making a piece that's morbid doesn't mean it is engaging by default.

Maybe if Fassbinder had directed it himself it would've at least been more rigorous in following the kind of distanced acting he could hone with his players (ie Merchant of Four Seasons is like a superior version of this now that I think of it, or even Why Herr R Runs Amok); some of those Fassbinder regulars pop up here, but mostly in cameos; Irm Herman has the other successfully unnerving scene here where she plays the incensed mother who discovers her two young girls that Baal is about to try to, well, ball. But they're not in it quite enough and the other actors here, Sigi Grau as Ekart and von Trothe as Sophie, are present but not able to channel the ennui the way Fassbinder can without doing much at all.

Ultimately though, I can pick apart what doesn't work as far as the direction or the performances, but it's just the whole vibe of the movie that didn't do it for me. Maybe I needed to be in a different sort of mood, or very very high and tapped into my dark and dank poetic soul, but it's maybe extremely hard for me to tap into this level of presentation where it's more conceptual, going back to the ideas in the play, and it feels less like a hypnotic experience and more like a bunch of drunk theater kids fucking around with cheap 16mm color stock. I admire the effort, and I'm glad it's finally seen the light of day (Brecht's widow suppressed the film for years, which I don't approve of despite my misgivings). But it's not till the last 15 minutes it coalesces into something palpable.