Gods of the Plague (1970) - film review

Shortly after being released from prison, small-time crook Franz Walsch meets up with his girlfriend Johanna but it is evident that the passion has gone out of their relationship.  Franz begins an affair with another woman, Margarethe, and strikes up a friendship with her ex-lover Günther, another hoodlum known as The Gorilla.  When Franz’s bother is murdered, the police believe he is the killer and set about bringing him to justice.  To get back at her former lover, Johanna betrays Franz to the police, revealing that he and Günther are planning to rob a supermarket.   The stage is set for a bloody showdown...

The middle instalment of a loose trilogy of films that begins with Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) and ends with The American Soldier (1970), Gods of the Plague is to Rainer Werner Fassbinder what À bout de souffle (1960) and Pierrot le fou (1963) are to French director Jean-Luc Godard - an exercise in cinematic deconstruction (specifically that of the American thriller B-movie) which reflects the cultural sterility afflicting contemporary society.   Gods of the Plague is both a sequel to and development of Love Is Colder Than Death, more technically ambitious and far richer in narrative content, arguably the best and most insightful of Fassbinder’s early films.  In common with many directors of the French New Wave (by whom he was greatly influenced), Fassbinder had a morbid affinity with American film noir of the 40s and 50s and reflected this fascination throughout his first decade of filmmaking, most evidently in his famous gangster trilogy.
 
The themes that Fassbinder introduces in Love Is Colder Than Death, in particular a rejection of consumerism and an attempt to view contemporary German society through the flawed archetypes of American film noir, are more powerfully rendered in Gods of the Plague.  It is no accident that the heist which forms the climax of the film takes place not, as you might expect, in a bank or jewellery shop, but in a modern supermarket.  If we accept Fassbinder’s thesis that consumerism has totally warped society’s notion of where true value lies, it is logical that his characters should end up risking their lives for packets of fish fingers and other vacuum wrapped tat, rather than the more usual stash of jewels and banknotes.

Typically for Fassbinder, the protagonists in Gods of the Plague are mostly young people who seem to be drifting through life in a zombie-like stupor.  (Taking his leave from French director Robert Bresson, Fassbinder drove his actors to suppress all external emotions in their performances.)   The main character, Franz Walsch (Fassbinder’s alter ego), hardly ever speaks and fails to show any sign of emotion, and yet he somehow manages to engage with those around him (men and women appear equally susceptible to his charms) and he is seen by the police as public enemy number one.  Fassbinder’s portrayal of young people in his early films is almost relentlessly depressing - they are morally vacuous, emotionally unresponsive and totally lacking in vitality.  Yet this merely echoes the sentiment felt by a large section of German youth who, like Fassbinder, saw that their country had become culturally barren and a slave to economic progress.  Soulless consumerism represented the be-all and end-all of German culture.

Whereas as Love Is Colder Than Death and The American Soldier both have a strong vein of dark humour and feel more like outright parodies than respectful homages to film noir, Gods of the Plague is far more serious in tone and a far more incisive piece of social commentary.   It takes the familiar motifs of the American gangster films of the 1940s and blows these up to almost ludicrous proportions - not to expose the absurdity of the genre it is imitating but to remind us of the absurdity of life in general.   Like many a classic film noir B-movie, the plot barely holds together and relies on the most ridiculous of contrivances - but isn’t real life exactly like that?  Godard’s À bout de souffle is referenced repeatedly, but the humour and irony of Godard’s film is elbowed out of the frame by Fassbinder, and all that remains are a few much darker slivers of humour, notably the blood-soaked denouement in the supermarket (a sly homage to the uncensored American gangster films of the early 1930s).

Spared the extreme budgetary constraints that hampered Fassbinder’s first few films, Gods of the Plague is a polished and assured piece of cinema that reveals, for the first time, the extent of its director’s filmmaking genius.  Even though, plotwise, the film is little more than a shameless compendium of cinematic references, which range from Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) to Godard’s Bande à part (1962) via Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946), it is a strikingly original piece of film art.  The camerawork and lighting evoke something of the stylistic brilliance of Orson Welles’s better films, channelling all of the beauty and elegance of the film noir aesthetic into a cogent socio-cultural statement.  There are few films made in Germany in the late 60s, early 70s that express so succinctly, and with such pathos, the frustration and disillusionment felt by a generation of young people who desperately craved a cultural identity and who saw themselves as sacrifices to the new Moloch of free market capitalism.

© James Travers 2012

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