Fassbinder with a dictionary

Nicolette Krebitz’s melodrama A Quick Dictionary of Love (AEIOU – Das schnelle Alphabet der Liebe) is released, which, in addition to the editing award, has earned the reputation of the most cheerful film in the competition program at the last Berlin Film Festival. Mikhail Trofimenkov he was sincerely upset: he hoped that everything would be bad for the heroes of the Dictionary.

From the very beginning, Krebitz’s film seems to have a Fassbinder note. Painfully contrasting – and in this contrast is potentially dangerous – a pair of hero-lovers. Not to such an extent, of course, as in Fassbinder’s film “The Fear of Eating the Soul” (1974), where fate brought together an elderly German cleaning lady and a brutal young Moroccan, but still.

Anna (Sophie Roiz) is a sixty-year-old actress, former star and former sex bomb, now out of circulation and widowed. The point, of course, is not so much in age, but in the specific plasticity of Royz. A kind of woman-knife, “pale mother Germany”, if you recall the lines of Brecht, consisting of sharp corners, both bodily and psychological. It is not difficult to understand the staff of a Strasbourg hotel who categorically refuses to print the windows of her room: the room is on the fifth floor, and one can expect anything from such a person. Conflicts with – as Krebitz makes clear – the sexist environment of show business knocked her out of the professional cage. Now she has to live, albeit in comfort, but solely at the mercy of the owner of the apartment, her faithful friend Michel (Udo Kier). And to get by with odd jobs: to give, for example, stage speech lessons to a difficult teenager from an orphanage.

Adrian (Milan Herms) is that difficult teenager. A seventeen-year-old thief, an evil blond and curly-haired boy, Fassbinder would have liked, able to publicly spit in the face of a mistress who would be his grandmother, and give her a pair of budgerigars. She and Anna know each other, which she does not know, even before their official meeting: it was Adrian who snatched her bag on the street one evening and ran away. In general, not a simple kid, but a time bomb, the explosion of which and failures at school, and a dead end romance with Anna should only speed up.

The blatant contrast of the characters, the accentuated theatricality of the action, and even the sarcasm hidden behind sentimentality, which is seen in rare off-screen comments, prepare the viewer for a bad denouement. It is also hinted at by the presence of the magnificent in his eighty-year-old beauty Udo Kier, classmate and one of Fassbinder’s fetish actors. The star of Lars von Trier and Miklós Jancso, “The Story of O” and “Shadow of the Vampire”, he is not so much involved in the action, although he acts as a kind of guardian angel for Anna, as he is sporadically on the screen. But how present! How she trims the roses in her garden and how she peers through the half-open door at Adrian. How regally he kisses Anna’s hand and bursts into laughter when he hears that his ward has landed in a French prison. Having outplayed a myriad of maniacs, sadists and other Draculas over a long acting life, Udo Kier simply cannot but be a herald of inevitable misfortune.

Anna and Adrian’s amusements become both more infantile and dangerous at the same time. Escape to the Cote d’Azur without a penny in your pocket. A chic serial theft in broad daylight, right on the street: as if masks from newspapers with slits for the eyes stuck on their faces make the heroes invisible. Night passage of naked Adrian with naked Anna in her arms through the streets of the resort town. The further, the more fun. From some point on, the viewer is no longer afraid of the appearance on the screen of cars with flashing lights and tired guys in bulletproof vests, but almost what they are waiting for. It seems that the intrusion of a faceless power machine is able to prevent something much more terrible than an arrest for theft. And the graceful intervention in the game of chance, which takes Adrian out of the field of attention of the law, seems, on the contrary, to be an evil irony of fate.

It turns out, however, that there are things more terrible than a nervous and unequal love affair, than the punitive organs of the state, and even than the gentle smile of Udo Cyrus. The most terrible thing, if not on earth, then on the screen, is the sentimentality of German culture. Ruthless geniuses like Fassbinder were themselves terribly sentimental, but they knew how to melt this sentimentality into existential cruelty. Modern talents – and Krebitz is certainly talented – are doing exactly the opposite: subordinating the cruelty of life to the melodramatic belief that everything in the world is good. Well, it’s the same thing: the viewer wipes away the tears of tenderness and experiences a feeling of deep satisfaction with how harmoniously the world is arranged – at least on the movie screen.