📽 CAT SCREWER [Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969] - Movie review by Mandibil

Fassbinder stays within the artistic formula of his debut movie from the same year. Several of the cast, including himself, are reused and though it is a bit hard on the director to blame him on this account, it does feel a bit like a "lets shoot another movie while we are at it". German cinema was pretty much in the dark before Fassbinder showed up, as far as I am concerned, so even if it is a low budget and clearly improvised movie, it does try to rub shoulders with the french new wave and art avantgarde.

A bunch of younger men and women in Munich spend their day hanging out on the street or in the local tavern. They are rather bored and depressive personalities, they tend to not look at each other but rather stare down at the ground only replying in short sentences or not at all. They are all romantically involved in one of the others, so they are basically 4 couples. We get to know their habits and their social inclinations.

They swing between being interested in each other and gossiping. They all have various sorts of "weaknesses" that they generally want to downplay. They apparently have sexual desires towards other than their partner but any attempts to follow their desire seem to turn into awkward and frustrating situations. One guy has a secret homosexual relation that basically homosexual prostitution. One guy has a dominating girlfriend that tosses him around blaming him for being kind of a parasite on her, which he is.

Then suddenly a stranger shows up. A Greek guy who has moved from Greece to Germany, probably to look for work. He rents a room at one of the couples and starts to get somewhat acquainted with the bunch. The girls shows most interest and soon the rumors go about this new man. He is probably a communist and worse, he likely has a big dick. This is all very frightening for the reactionary bunch. They actually feel energized and closer together by having a common "threat" they can channel their mediocre life into and blame for their lack of happiness.

The men finally beat up the Greek guy, to do something about his presence. They are then all feeling a rather self righteous but at the same time becoming freed from the "bunch" in a sense and are now able to relate to a world outside this confining group.

The cinematography is almost identical to the previous movie and it gives it a sort of discount feel. The limitations on the budget and the rigs available for camera shots and movement meant that they had to wrap the cinematography round those limitations rather than choose the appropriate shooting style independantly. This means that the very flat and static cinematography is as much a result of physical limitations as it is an artistic choice, and probably even more so. Limitations are not always a bad thing for creativity - on the contrary. Just look at George Lucas waste of cinema goers time with the prequels, where he no longer had to be inventive as in the first trilogy, but could rely heavily on CGI.

But in the case of Fassbinder here, the artistic expression is just too flat and two dimensional. The characters are made equally flat to merge with these limitations and the overall feel of the movie is forced boredom and underplayed interactions to twist your mind into surrendering to a rather unbelievable social structure in a group of young people. The scenes that actually made me go wow, was those who had some persdpective and depth like those scenes in stairways, particularly the one with Schygulla.

There is no doubt that Fassbinder tried hard to come up with ways to use the limited tools he had. The only times the characters do not move in the flat plane of the setup, is a repeated scene, where two characters walk towards a camera tracking backwards, while they are gossiping. It is a sort of romanticising of the feminine side of the story, as there are always at least one woman, usually two. I do not quite get these tracking shots and I am thinking that they are what thje limited tools available made possible.

I did not feel any real connection to any of the characters or their stories. The slight twist of american coolness with sunglasses and tough guy looks, I think are typical homo-erotic aspects of Fassbinder popping up. He even has one of the tough looking guys, having a homosexual relation while he himself plays the greek with "the big dick". It is quite clear to me that Fassbinder is moulding over how love relations work between heterosexual couples, while incorporating homosexual aspects into that scenario, if just in a very suttle way.

Fassbinder had worked at a theatre for years before he became a director/filmactor, and it shows here that he has an exemplary nose for composition and flatting out the scenes to fit the whole canvas of the filmroll. At the same time this is my greates complaint as it becomes so claustrophobic that it makes it frustrating to watch unless you are deeply in love with this style. It does not have the elegant flow and poetic liberty of the french new wave cinema and it is not very artsy at it roots in any account. It is told that it took only a week to film and in my opinion it shows.

I have due respect for any director who tries out new ideas and uses the tools he has available however limited they may be. I never judge a movie by its budget or its impressiveness but in this case the limitations are being hailed as artistic expression and that is not going to make it for me. The basic stories are not that interesting and as a whole the theme of foreigners and workers coming from the outside and are hit by recent from the inhabitants is not that well executed either. Some of the acting is amateurish and the overall feel is pretentiousness. The director wants to be artsy more than he wants to tell the characters stories. I can recommend this for the avantgarde interest, but not any more than that.

The title has been translated from "Katzelmacher", which is a southern german and Austrian slang for guest-workers from southern Europe and Turkey in the late sixties, meaning "cat-screwer". I do not believe that there is an official english translation of the title.

Rating: 4/10