Suprisingly cold, even for a Fassbinder film. Some seconds after the opening credits play out (which too is purposefully repetitive and despondent), you almost for a moment think the video must have been jammed, until Marie comes out of the store and sets acceleration to the frame (and the car and its occupant), just enough to get the video rolling. The same recipe is sustained onwards, with broken tableaux transpiring in locations such as bedrooms, living rooms, toilets, staircases, alleys etcetera etcetera. The situations neither progress nor loop, rather follow something akin to overdubbing of things and people onto images of total isolation; remove the organisms and it becomes a world devoid of life, brutally detached from even the closest space beyond the frame. Either way, a Beckettian edge is perceptible from the beginning; anticipations so extended that the subjects who anticipate become phantoms of anticipation itself. Completely different from Fassbinder's volatile expressionist works such as Die bitteren Tränen, this prior style is like splattering and plastering all living things onto solids of surroundings, his characters' movements like gooey matter barely sliding across surfaces, subordinates to Gotteslied - excuse my bad habit of beating out black comedy wherever it may wave from. Apart from the sterile aspect, Katzelmacher's quotability is amazing, as if Fassbinder put together the greatest hits of French romantic films, only to disfigure them with an apathetic cast. This lack of passion is mainly what makes such a cold work darkly humorous; whenever you notice a change of pitch from the actors, it makes for a crudely funny, and may I add, pathetic scenario.

• Written on 27 Jun 2020