When adversity comes, it never rains but pours in Fassbinder’s FOX AND HIS FRIEND, in which he plays a working-class lad Franz “Fox” Bieberkopf, uncouth, unsophisticated and batting for the other team. Fox hits the jackpot of 500,000 German marks in lottery with a keen prescience, his ship finally comes in, butlucre never bodes well in the hands of those who do not reap it squarely, after a chance meeting with a cultivated, handsome Eugen (Chatel), whose family is running a printing house which happens to be on the skids, they strike up a relationship, but spectators are fully conversant with Eugen’s ulterior intention, it is the financial gain what he is spoiling for.
One genuine, relentless intrigue amid Fox’s misfortune, with his lottery money being prosaically chiseled away as the sole provider in the relationship - the loan he offers to Eugen’s family business (without poring over the contract), acquiring a fancy apartment to shack up and all its trappings (Karlheinz Böhm is a cryptic, suave antique dealer who introduces Fox to his cohorts of similar tastes), in time, whose ownership will be transferred under Eugen’s name, a trip to Morocco to iron out quotidian squabbles (during which they futilely solicit a male sex worker, Fassbinder’s ex-lover El Hedi ben Salem’s last screen presence, ironically because the hotel they stay discreetly intends to keep the profit for itself), plus a posh automobile, is that we are all agog to see if and when Fox will see through the put-ons, and what will be his reaction.
That expectancy is Fassbinder’s cunning machination to engage his wide-eyed audience, who will only be convulsively taken aback in the harrowing coda because poetic justice is scarcely of Fassbinder’s concern, meanwhile, the melodrama plays out with his typical spatial constraint, dexterously presented by DP Michael Ballhaus’ observant camera, all emotional subtlety smolders within almost every assiduously arranged frame.
Like its peer, William Friedkin’s THE BOYS IN THE BAND (1970), FOX AND HIS FRIENDS eschews the more topical if to today’s eyes, more banal issue of “coming-out” fixation, Fox and his gay friends have no baggage of being gay, and any symptom of homophobia is bottled up to the absolute minimum, instead, Fassbinder normalizes his sexual orientation like a flown-alone yellow flag, the story would have no significant difference had the central relationship been altered to a heterosexual one, the impact is hefty anyway, only under a queer context, it adds more personal empathy towards Fassbinder and his Fox, his most vivid screen image as an actor, and it is quite staggering to see Fassbinder the actor pull off a rather sympathetic embodiment of a fleshed-out character, an cursed fool exploited to the hilt.
Virilely flagging up the hypocrisy, cupidity and cruelty that can acutely and damningly define the downside of upper-middle hierarchal characteristics, Fassbinder’s class-divergence treatise is incisive and absorbing as ever, autre temps, mais pas autre mœurs.
referential entries: Fassbinder’s ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL (1974, 8.7/10); William Friedkin’s THE BOYS IN THE BAND (1970, 7.8/10).
