Rio das Mortes

Excellent early Fassbinder about two shiftless young men who decide, seemingly on the spur of a moment, that the next big step in their lives will be an extended expedition for treasure in Peru's Rio das Mortes region. One of their fiancées (Hanna Schygulla, as gorgeous and as great as ever) finds the notion stupid and wants to put a stop to it. It's a droll comedy and has a ton of great sequences. This is the first film in a Fassbinder bender I'm going on. I'm planning on seeing all of the films of his that have recently been released on DVD. I've been thinking a lot about this particular auteur lately. I don't think that enough time has passed since his untimely death to allow his career to be taken into proper perspective. Fassbinder reminds me a lot of Rohmer, Ozu, Godard and Bresson. He's in his own little world in his films (a world which changed a lot in the 13 or so years during which he was active), and a lot of people are still misunderstanding it as overly theatrical, or stilted, or otherwise. The more films one sees by him, the more one gets adjusted to this universe. I think Rio das Mortes is best appreciated by Fassbinder's fans, and is unlikely to make any new converts (start with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fox and His Friends, and The Marriage of Maria Braun).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a writer/director whose body of work varies more widely than just about any other. Some of his films, such as "Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven", are brilliant and some are absolutely terrible and self-indulgent ("Querelle" comes to mind). There just is no categorizing of this enigmatic man's work. Yet, oddly, there are also some disciples of the man who talk about his films like they are ALL brilliant works of art--even though the average viewer would never sit through many of his films. Imagine Joe Average watching AND ENJOYING such Fassbinder films as "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant"--it just isn't going to happen! And, because practically every film he made is adored by a small but loyal crowd, I am reminded of the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes! In the case of "Rio das Mortes", it's official--Fassbinder is, so to speak, absolutely naked!

While I realize that the production quality of Fassbinder's films are not usually up to Hollywood standards (partly, I think, because he made so many, many films so rapidly in succession), even by Fassbinder standards "Rio das Mortes" looks cheap. The print is ultra-grainy and the film looks as if it was filmed with an 8 or 16mm camera. It was steady (fortunately), but it just had poor resolution.

As for the acting and story, unfortunately, they were actually much worse than the poor camera-work. The acting, in many cases, was terrible--with actors doing about as well as you'd expect from community theater--but no better. There also was a pretty meaningless fistfight that made me laugh--as the blow obviously never connected! As for the plot, it never engaged, as you really never cared about these two fist fighting friends. Part of it was the script and part of you just wondered why these two flakes with absolutely no training wanted to sell everything to move to Peru to try to find some Incan treasure (though sometimes the idiots referred to it as 'Mayan'!). As for the film's ending involving the Robert Plant-like leading man and his sexy but screwy girlfriend with a gun, it just made my brain hurt.

Frankly, there's nothing to like about the film. Nothing.

In Fassbinder's published manuscripts, interviews, notes and his own work as a playwright, poet, film critique, including philosophical writings, there is practically nothing to be found about the possibly highly interesting relationship between Fassbinder and Herbert Achternbusch (in 1971, Achternbusch's first big novel had appeared). Achternbusch must have taken up "Rio Das Mortes" thematically in his film "Das Letzte Loch" (1982) and in the novel "Das Haus Am Nil" (1981), respectively. Thereby, it does not matter if the Nil is in Egypt or not - the Nil is the protagonist, best a personification of an abstract concept "Nil" - and like is bearer basically unbound. And so is the Rio Das Mortes - by the way, it is not in Peru, but in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. Nietzsche wrote his famous passage about Mexican Oaxaca - needless to say the had never been there and the name and his concept have not much more than a phonetic reality. Such use of landscapes, cities, rivers, etc. have a good and long tradition in German literature, going back at least down to Goethe's Arcadia: Et in Arcadia ego.

This is a good film which will appeal to the realist Fassbinder fans but does not in any way rank with his best gritty works (Merchant, Herr R., Ali)perhaps because of its unrealistic proceedings: The story develops somewhat slowly and predictably, and none of the characters have much development. The acting is good yet primitive, and definitely has an repertory feel to it--one of the beauties of RWF's movies: it was almost comforting to see Gunther Kaufmann, Hanna Schygulla, and Harry Baer together. Michael Konig also puts in a good role as Michel. I thought the best scenes of the movie are when Gunther and Michel seek financial assistance from Hanna's relative.