Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.
Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and His Friends) is an unpleasant film. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a bad film, but it’s not a very nice one. This has nothing to do with a number of aspects many people will have problems with. The characters are uniformly gay, for instance; the same sort of person who hated Brokeback Mountain on moral rather than cinematic grounds will have trouble getting more than a few minutes into this one. There’s also a surprising amount of cock. At one point, in fact, there is cock that appears to be entirely decorative, laying languidly flaccid in the background of a scene filled with conversation.
Franz “Fox” Biberkopf (director Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a gay man without a lot going for him. He works at a carnival as a “talking head,” an allegedly severed head that can speak. As the film opens, the carnival owner and his lover, Klaus (Karl Scheydt) is arrested for tax fraud. Suddenly jobless, homeless, and penniless, Fox desperately attempts to play the German lottery, convinced (as he is every week) that he will win. As it happens, this time he does, pocketing a cool half million marks. This makes the slow, tactless, and somewhat unattractive Fox a sudden catch for a few elegant gay men with expensive tastes. Most notable, Fox becomes enamored of Eugen (Peter Chatel), the heir to a printing company that has fallen on hard times.
