Fassbinder Collection: The Merchant of Four Seasons (15)

Dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972, Germany, 88 mins
Cast: Hans Hirschmüller, Irm Hermann, Hannah Schygulla

Alongside Wim Wenders, with whom he is credited for kick-starting the New German Cinema of the 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder is most probably - pace Herzog - Germany’s greatest post-war director. Despite dying of an overdose in 1982 at the age of 36, Fassbinder’s incredible work-rate and his method of using more or less the same cast and crew throughout his career, allowed him to produce 41 films in just 14 years. The Merchant of Four Seasons was the breakthrough movie which saw him establish his position as the equally derided and lauded enfant terrible of 1970s art-house cinema.

Hans (Hirschmüller), a grocer in Munich, is a severe disappointment to his bourgeois family. In the film’s opening scene, pointedly placed before the credits to set the tone, he returns home from a year in the Foreign Legion. His mother asks him about the school friend, who accompanied him, whom he tells her has died. “The good boys pay the price,” she tells him, “and people like you come back.” Hans is a man who has had the idea of being a failure repeatedly impressed upon him, both by his family and society. He loves his wife Irmgard (Hermann) – he resists sexual advances from a woman on his delivery rounds – but his self-hatred boils over into neglect of her and their daughter Renate, excessive drinking, and ultimately violence.

The scene in which a drunken Hans returns home and attacks his wife is classic Fassbinder. The camera remains static while he rains blows down on Irmgard while Renate, perhaps six years old, beats him on the back to make him stop. The scene is not unfamiliar, but the nagging insistence of its length forces the viewer to see it as more than a purely dramatic act. Fassbinder makes it impossible not to think how it would feel both to receive and to dole out those blows. Gaspar Noé utilised this technique to more extreme effect in Irreversible’s (2002) rape scene.

Even more agonising, however, and the film’s true masterstroke, is a family dinner party at which the hypocrisy and straitened, claustrophobic concerns of the German bourgeoisie are peeled back by a hypnotic, metronomic camera tracking back and forth throughout a stifling conversation regarding prospects, careers and profits. Perhaps it is one of the autobiographical flourishes of which Fassbinder was so fond, that has Hans’s sister Anna (Schygulla) - the only member of his family who sees through his faults to the person he could be - ending this torturous tedium with astonishing frankness, yet being incapable of effecting any lasting change to her family’s unpleasant attitudes.

At its end, after tragedy of a sort has struck, the status quo is quickly and peaceably restored. Paradoxically, the film’s calm ending underlines the ire with which it regards the conformism of post-war West German society, a society in which the dreamer is subtly but determinedly eradicated. Hans is in many ways a hateful person, but Fassbinder chooses to study the causes as opposed to judging him by his actions. While some elements, especially the Benny Hill Show camera zooms at moments of high drama and some decidedly dodgy acting (very few of Fassbinder’s actors prospered away from his direction), have aged poorly, the humanism and painful honesty that lie at the film’s heart will never do so.

Extras:
Includes Women on Fassbinder featurette; Life, Love and Celluloid featurette; Notes on film

Chris Power