In this quietly scathing film from Fassbinder we have a portrait of a community and of a country. It happens to be West Germany, but could have been anywhere, and the words ' We belong here and no one else ' are as applicable today as they were back in 1969. The group are made up of men and women who talk to each other in front of a generic house with flowers on the window sills, and then they go to what they call a tavern and play cards and continue mouthing banalities that are so cruel and appalling that I wanted to close my ears to what I was hearing. The men when not talking abuse their women and this is portrayed as being casually ' normal, ' and one of the men is a male prostitute who kisses his male clients. Money and how to get it, criminally or otherwise dominates their conversations, if you can call them that. And they want the ' normality ' of this existence until a ' foreigner ' enters their community. Fassbinder himself plays this role and he is excellent. The foreigner is Greek and rumours start circulating such as his penis being bigger than the other men, and jealousy begins to enter this communal garden of evil. What happens next I will not reveal, but as in all Fassbinder the taking of money by fair means or foul is dominant. Personally I like Fassbinder's earlier films, and this I believe was close to the beginning of his incredible output. The near static nature and use of minimal sets has by some been put down to lack of money, but I believe he needed us, the viewers, to focus and the camera, almost unmoving, makes the content pitilessly accurate. I rate Fassbinder to be one of the handful of the greatest film directors and this film is in my opinion equal if not better than some of his last work. Sheer genius.
Review of Katzelmacher
