Le fiancé, la comédienne et le maquereau

This is a good example of how inventive the short film format may be;much is condensed into the twenty-three minute running time, making this film seem much longer than its duration would suggest.The film has its roots in a theatre production of a play by the Austrian playwright Ferdinand Bruckner which Straub had been asked to direct by a German theatre company.He considered the play too verbose and cut its length from several hours down to just ten minutes,and it is the production of this play which forms the centrepiece of the film. The film begins with a long,hypnotic tracking shot along a Munich street frequented by prostitutes.This short scene is followed by the ten minute play which stars a young Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla.The next two scenes seem to belong in a different film completely.They concern an actress and her black boyfriend whom her pimp is trying to kill before her wedding,hence the film's title.Eventually the narrative logic begins to make sense as the girl is a prostitute and her pimp was one of the characters featured in the play. While most directors would have needed several hours to make sense of this plot,Straub miraculously manges to make all the disparate elements play off against each other in an enthralling experimental work which may be one of his greatest achievements.

It's difficult to know where to start when reviewing such a film.

There are three parts in the film and the third is the only one where there seems to be some effort in conveying something to the audience.

The first is a travelling shot from a car in a street so poorly lit it is impossible to understand what the filmmaker's point is. I am a big fan of such shots and I would have immediately discarded this shot as it's just to dark. I understood after reading a critic's review that it is the red light district in Munich and that there are prostitutes on the street. There were maybe two ladies that might give that idea to the audience and they only appeared ten seconds out of the 4 minutes the shot takes.

The second is a casserole of antiquated far-left shananigans with unrelatable characters served through a single fixed camera angle of a poorly designed theater scene meant to be a lobby in a brothel (supposedly). Ideals, principles,quotes about life are mixed with dry dialogues where women are objectified. The brechtian apartés highlight the distance from which the filmmaker is treating his subject. How did this filmmaker gather the guts to make a film about such a serious thing without being concerned of showing any element of truth of their lives? What is most mind-boggling to me is that Straub and Huillet are meant to be communists or leftists but one just needs to watch five minutes of their films to be slapped in the face by unabashed elitist tendencies: obscure references, unjustified technical whims, plain lazy attitude toward driving a point home. The film reeks of arrogance and pretention from start to finish. I know they liked Bresson and I really do wonder what they copied from him apart from his courage. Also I have given myself the task of watching Pedro Costa's documentary on this couple filmmaker as there must be something that I am missing if Pedro Costa is so in awe of these two. It's just that every five years I try watching a film of theirs and I get really upset with the way they treat the medium.