Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975) - film review

Franz Biberkopf is a good-natured but guileless young man who earns a modest living as an act in a travelling circus.  When his employer is arrested for tax evasion, Franz loses both his job and his boyfriend.  He is not downhearted, however.  He is convinced he will win the national lottery.  Whilst cruising, he is picked up by a gay antiques dealer, Max, and just manages to get to the newsagents’ in time to buy his winning lottery ticket.   Flush with his half a million Deutschmark winnings, Franz attracts the attention of Eugen, a gay bourgeois sophisticate.   The latter throws over his current boyfriend, Philip, to start a relationship with Franz, although he makes no secret of his dislike for his new lover’s lack of social graces.  It transpires that Eugen’s father owns a printing business which has run into financial difficulties.  Frantz readily agrees to loan Eugen one hundred thousand Deutschmarks to keep the company solvent.  When Eugen is evicted from his lodgings, Frantz allows himself to be talked into buying an expensive apartment, complete with lavish furnishings.   Little by little, Frantz’s nest egg is eaten away, until finally he has nothing left.  Then Eugen reveals his true colours...

Although he appeared in many of his films, Rainer Fassbinder very rarely took the leading role.  It is therefore interesting that when he does play a principal character he often appears as the victim - the detested immigrant in Katzelmacher and the exploited innocent in Faustrecht der Freiheit.   The director’s insecurities are as well documented as his outlandish lifestyle and political views, but these films perhaps reveal much more about who Fassbinder was, about the personal demons that tormented him and motivated him in his work.

Faustrecht der Freiheit (a.k.a. Fox and His Friends) is unique in that Fassbinder plays the leading character who is the emotional focus for the entire film.  There are some obvious superficial similarities between Fassbinder and the man he portrays, Frantz (known to his friends as Fox).  But just how deeply runs the association between the two individuals, how closely is art mirroring real life?  Like Fassbinder, Franz is overly conscious of his working class origins and has an almost obsessive need to be loved.  Is the director also making a statement on how he feels about commercial filmmaking?  Does he feel like the exploited lover, tolerated only because of his financial worth?  The similarity in the ultimate fate of Franz and the director’s own tragic demise is also striking, and adds another layer of irony and pathos to the film.  Fassbinder’s decision to eschew theatrical stylisation in favour of a more naturalistic mode of expression makes this a particularly easy film to engage with, devastatingly so.

Like many German filmmakers of his generation, Rainer Fassbinder was mindful of the social issues that were afflicting his country and would bring these into his films in an intelligent, often provocative, manner.   Faustrecht der Freiheit aroused great controversy with its largely negative depiction of gay men (as camp, self-centred hedonists) but it was also one of the first German films to refer directly to the problem of homophobia.  The film also touches on racism - the subject of Fassbinder’s previous Angst essen Seele auf (1974) - but its main themes are class divisions in society and the inherently exploitative nature of capitalism.

The film’s German language title, Faustrecht der Freiheit, translates literally as Fist-Fight of Freedom, which we can interpret as Survival of the Fittest or The Law of the Jungle.  The jungle in this case is of course the capitalist system, which allows one set of individuals (the bourgeois elite represented by the unscrupulous Eugen) to prosper at the expense of others (the ignorant working class, epitomised by Frantz).  In Fassbinder’s most bitterly cynical critique of capitalism, we see how love itself is reduced to a commodity, to be bought by those who can afford to pay, but never given freely.

Whilst its conclusion is bleak to the point of nihilism, the film does contain a fair amount of subtle humour along the way.  Much of the comedy derives from the fact that Frantz appears to live in complete ignorance of Eugen’s motives and true feelings for him, whilst all this is blatantly obvious to the spectator.  Eugen doesn’t hold up a banner saying "You stink you filthy pleb" every time he sees Frantz, but he doesn’t need to.  His facial expression says as much.  Of course, this twisted comedy ultimately morphs into Greek tragedy when Frantz learns the truth and realises that love cannot be bought.  At this point, the chuckles freeze in your throat and your heart feels as though it has been given the full Van Helsing treatment.  For those who genuinely appreciate Fassbinder’s work, and know something of his life story, the final sequence is almost too painful to watch, yet it is one of cinema’s most powerful expressions of human frailty.

© James Travers 2010

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