Rainer Werner Fassbinder's (Ali Fear Eats the Soul/Veronika Voss) 1972 drama. Living a simple life, a fruit vendor, Hans Hirschmuller, has hit a crossroads in his life as his marriage is on the rocks (his wife, Irm Hermann, has an eye for a new lover) & he's not happy at his occupation. Drowning his sorrows in drink he unfortunately takes to laying the occasional smack to Hermann but one day she's had enough & leaves him. After a health crisis sends Hirschmuller to the hospital, Hermann forgives him but not before shacking up w/another. Hoping to lighten his load, his wife suggests they take on another fruit cart & employee to make some extra money. Hermann agrees but as fate would have it, Hermann's lover shows up to apply for the job, getting it. Nearly being caught for her extramarital excursions, Hermann's lover gets into a heated argument w/Hirschmuller (thinking he was stealing from him) where he reveals Hermann's infidelity but Hirschmuller doesn't buy it paving the way for an old friend of Hirchmuller's (from his military days), who he runs into at an eatery, to take over the position but w/the growing success of his business & seeming tranquility of his marriage, Hirschmuller falls into a funk he doesn't seem to grow out of. Supposedly conceived as a comedy (German humor, right?) w/the actors delivering their lines in an off kilter manner, this simple tale's message of a man getting sick & tired of the rat race becomes a battle between audience & film as the bare bones lensing, unglamorous looking thespians & downbeat tone doesn't make this an easy watch even at a paltry 90 minutes which if you've seen enough of Fassbinder's output is pretty much par for the course but when you have high line outfits like Criterion continually adding Fassbinder's output into its rosters I think people may equate pedigree for quality but when a master makes a dud, it's a dud but what do I know.
Review of The Merchant of Four Seasons
