Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) - film review

Franz, a small time pimp, finds himself in the offices of a powerful German crime syndicate.  The gangsters offer him a regular income for easy work but he refuses to join them, since he prefers the freedom he gains by working on his own account.   During the interview Franz meets Bruno, an attractive young man who is strangely drawn to him.  Some time later, after Franz has returned to his home in Munich, Bruno sets about trying to find him.  Several prostitutes provide Bruno with some valuable leads and it is not long before the young hoodlum has run the object of his fascination to ground.  Bruno joins Franz and his girlfriend Joanna in their cramped apartment and the trio make an uncomfortable ménage à trois.  Joanna resents Bruno’s presence, whilst Bruno seems incapable of expressing his true feelings for Franz.  To relieve the tension, the three embark on a small crime spree.  Once Franz has disposed of a hit man, they plan to rob a bank.  Joanna at last sees an opportunity to get rid of Bruno...

Love and life without passion or purpose in a cold urban wilderness - this is the essence of Rainer Fassbinder’s debut feature, an austere revisionist film noir gangster film that effectively lays the groundwork for much of the director’s subsequent work.  Fassbinder’s influences – the American film noir thriller and the films of the French New Wave directors – are obvious and referenced without subtlety, and yet this most flamboyant of post-war German filmmakers creates a work of startling originality and significance.  Devotees of French cinema will immediately detect plot and stylistic similarities with Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle and Bande à part; Godard and his contemporaries would provide the inspiration for much of Fassbinder’s early work and help him to develop his distinctive neo-expressionistic style.

The landscape of Love Is Colder Than Death is how many artists saw the world in the late 1960s, a world in which rampant consumerism and declining moral standards had devalued human relationships and created a burgeoning existentialist crisis in those who wanted more from life than an expensive car and a chic fondue set.  The main characters in this film appear incapable of showing outward emotions but instead resemble automata, clockwork toys that move around, do things, and yet do not seem to be alive.  All three of them are prevented from living, as free-thinking, freely motivated individuals, because of the external constraints imposed on them by the flawed society in which they exist.  

Franz (played by Fassbinder himself) is a man for whom freedom is everything.  Yet he can never be free because he has chosen a career in which he is always in the sights of the police and rival gangsters.   Joanna’s own fulfilment is inhibited by her misguided bourgeois prejudice, whilst Bruno’s obvious homosexual leanings are knocked well and truly into the closet by contemporary attitudes to same sex relationships.  The three characters live a life that is a sham, and they know it.  They are little more than marionettes, half-heartedly acting out the roles in which they have been cast, simulating love in the same way that they simulate life, a love that is as cold as death.

The apparent lack of humanity that we see in the three protagonists is callously amplified by the film’s austere presentation.  Much of the drama takes place in Spartan, over-lit sets that lack any individuality.  The camerawork consists mainly of long static shots, in which there is virtually no movement, or long tracking shots that take us through a characterless urban desert.  Fassbinder presents us with a vision of our world that is utterly soulless and barren, an existential void in which humanity has lost its way and arrived at a grim parody of life that is truly and irredeemably meaningless.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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