Radu Gabrea's film à clef on the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, called here E.V.A., and played by one of his former repertory actresses, Eva Mattes. That's right, actresses. The casting helps point up his bisexual ambiguity, although the actress's shortness of stature throws in a perhaps unwanted hint of Napoleonism. Otherwise her presence is not terribly unsettling. She had the chubby cheeks to begin with, and completion of the illusion demanded only a scraggly false beard to coat those cheeks, plus the ever-present cigarettes, wire-rim glasses, felt hat, leather boots and jacket, and a sort of chain-gang slouch and shuffle. Fassbinder's friends and associates, if this portrait is at all accurate, must have had much fun mimicking him behind his back. But this is something more (and something less) than fun. Tawdry, exaggerated, uninvolving (or "distancing" if you prefer), and yet deeply serious in intent, it is in those ways entirely worthy of its subject. Nor is it unworthy of the Wunderkind of the New German Cinema in what it shows of him as a filmmaker: the hypothetical production of La Dame aux Camilias seems like something he very well might have done (the alluded-to production of A Doll's House is something he actually did do), and there are the proper quantities of flowers, vases, mirrors, and so forth, for him to have done it. Of course the higher one holds the real Fassbinder, the less worthy this is apt to seem, and the sensational National Enquirer revelations of his personal life won't (and shouldn't) convince anyone of its worthiness. "It is better to be hated for what you are," the prologue quotes Andre Gide to us, "than to be loved for what you are not." Agreed, but surely there are other alternatives. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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