“The American Soldier” (1970)
The third of a loose “gangster” trilogy and the fifth of ten features the famously speedy filmmaker made between 1969 and 1971, Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s “The American Soldier” is, perhaps unsurprisingly, often viewed as part of a continuum, a kind of rolling palimpsest of story strands from previous projects interspersed with seedling ideas that would be developed in later movies. Indeed, one monologue here forms the basis for one of his masterpieces, “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.” But if “The American Soldier,” in which Karl Scheydt‘s German/American Vietnam vet Ricky returns to Munich and is promptly engaged as a hitman by a group of corrupt cops, has a standalone manifesto (and it can be hard to glean one from a film so characterized by abrupt mood swings and shifts in tone), it’s the inseparability of sex and death. As such, Fassbinder runs through the gamut of gangster noir archetypes to create a depersonalized world where women are casually pushed out of cars, acts of fornication almost always end with gunshots and life is cheaper than a bottle of Ballantines (Ricky’s tipple of choice). But classical as it sometimes feels, this is still Fassbinder, and the experimental, amateur theatrics vibe still emerges at times, especially in newcomer Scheydt’s blocklike performance and almost comical impassivity. And yet it all builds to a whole that is so much greater than the sum of its parts, a film best summed up by its audaciously absurd four-minute unbroken closing shot. Like that extended moment, the film is a kind of roiling slo-mo orgy of violence and eroticism, all in service of a filmmaking imagination so penetrating and ravenous that it seems like Fassbinder is taking movies apart to see how they work.
“The Consequences of Love” (2005)
One of the reasons that the splashy, ill-disciplined “Youth” proved such a disappointment to many of us round here is that this 2005 film, more so even than his Oscar-winning “The Great Beauty,” established that Paolo Sorrentino‘s exquisite eye (in collaboration with regular DP Luca Bigazzi) can create films in which the inarguably romanced visuals are put in service of a compelling and insightful character study. A quiet, meticulous story that is lent a grandly operatic air by the fluidity and richness of the images, the film concerns Titta (the invaluable Tony Servillo), a lonely man living a chilly life of little human contact in a grand hotel. We gradually discover his secrets and his history: he’s been forced into exile from his family by a blunder he committed as an investment broker with money belonging to the Cosa Nostra. Now he passes the time with his heroin addiction, doing their bidding, but this simple if lonely existence becomes complicated when he starts to fall for the hotel barmaid Sofia (Olivia Magnani, Anna‘s granddaughter). If the pace is measured, the twists are revealed with such cleverness and the characters’ psychologies feel so believable that it becomes entirely, sensuously absorbing. It’s helped in no small part by an inspired soundtrack that mixes classical music with rock and electronica (Mogwai, Boards of Canada), while Bigazzi’s camera glides around its subjects like a figure skater. The grand decay of antiquated social hierarchies is evoked here too (much as it was in “The Great Beauty”), especially in the aging aristocrats who live in a room of the hotel they used to own, but here that milieu is notable for the amorality, alienation and desperation it hides behind a genteel facade.
