After a break of several months in which I have been involved in a never-ending project that has yet to reach completion, I have decided to resume blogging. If perhaps I feel less strongly than before about the need to maintain a record of books and movies and outings that I have seen and participated in this past year, I nonetheless continue to feel that this is a good excuse to include thoughts about my life and endeavours.
Earlier today I saw the German film, Merchant of all Seasons. It is a film by the prolific Rainer Werner FaBbinder, the West German director who did so much to revitalize the films of his native country. Of course, when I was a young man, I had never heard of him, but when I commenced taking German language classes at the university, I still remember the admiration that was expressed by the graduate student instructors who taught our classes. He did produce a series of compelling films that highlighted human interactions, and the ways in which German society was developing.
This film deals with the story of a rather modest, short and pudgy German man by the name of Hans, one who seems to be somewhat lost and is stumbling through life. He has experienced rejection from his family, and finds himself in a somewhat tepid marriage to a woman named Irmgard.
The film deals with the breakdown suffered by this man, as he finds himself unable to stop yearning for that which was unobtainable for him. What was unobtainable was a life that was honest, one in which class considerations, social conventions and the pressures for conformity and upward mobility were not as crushing. After all, he is a fruit vendor who peddles his product from his cart, all during a period of time in which the German economy has sprouted and grown wings, this transformation being known as the “Wirtschaftwunder”.
His family despises him, and the real love of his life rejected him. He seems out of sorts with the culture of his time, and the spirit of rising expectations. It was, perhaps, an optimistic time, but one in which everyone was compromising their values in order to gain financially. Hans, however, seems unable to do so.
We will see the desintegration of his family and, slowly enough, the continued disintegration of this man. Life in which ambition and personal dreams are unreachable seems to be a curse that he can’t withstand, and the film in its modest way suggests this psychological crisis. I say that this is done in a modest way because the acting is not particularly noteworthy. It would seem as if a director who was known for low-budget films relied on seeming amateurs, at least from what is evident in this movie.
The characters are never truly convincing. This may also be the fault of the screenplay, which seems also a little too simplistic, with much awkward dialogue that seems to not mirror the true rhythm and expression of everyday life. It seems more like a student film, and the direction as well seems somewhat amateurish. Once again, perhaps because it was one of FaBbinder’s earlier films, although I also seem to recall being very impressed with another film that came from this era, “Ali: Fear eats the Soul”, about a migrant workder (Gastarbeiter) who falls in love with a middle-aged German widow.
There are scenes that are not convincing, and that seem comical in their awkwardness. One such is the scene where he is being whipped by a towering black man during his stint in the Foreign Legion in Morocco. Who would honestly think that a mild, pudgy man with no earstwhile talent or physical dexterity would have been accepted for the Foreign Legion? And who would think that adding this background detail would in any way lend credence to the character? Once again, this must have been an early FaBbinder film.
What it does do is recall the way in which each society will inevitably generate its own outcasts. The merchant is one, unable to become a staid and respectable businessman until the very end, when it is too late. Ironically, this ends up driving him over the edge, as he reflect that it hasn’t changed the way he is viewed by his family, one that patronizes him and which he has resigned himself to never being able to win over. It seems almost like a film about adolescence in mid-life, with all the anxieties and all the self-deceptions and the untameable anger. Irmgard, his wife, forgives him after he has beaten her, but he never seems to be able to redeem himself, and gives himself over to longing.
Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013
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