045 - The Merchant of Four Seasons, 1971, Germany. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

045 - The Merchant of Four Seasons, 1971, Germany. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Everyone wants to be loved.

The good news is that love is available.

To everyone.

Openly.

Freely.

Unconditionally.

The bad news is that not everyone finds it.

The Merchant of Four Seasons is film about a man who did not find it.

It is also entertaining.

Hans Epps is a fruit vendor.  He pushes a cart full of pears.  He sets up in a courtyard outside an apartment complex.  He calls up to the windows.

"Fresh Pears!  Get your fresh pears!  1.40 a kilo.  A real bargain!"

He has a warm, inviting voice.  He chants it like a song.  He draws people.

A woman opens a window.  Bring me two pounds.

Hans's wife Irmgard glares at him.  She does not want him to go up.

She is standing out in the open courtyard fixing her own stockings to her garter belt, apparently getting ready to start the day.

He looks at her.  She scowls.  He looks put upon.  "I have to."

He puts some pears in a paper sack.  Note that he does not weigh them.  Throughout the movie they will weigh every order on a set of scales sitting on the fruit cart.  But not this time.  Is he distracted?  Is he upset?  Is he so good at his job that he knows it by feel?

He goes up.

The woman opens the door.  They stare at each other.  She is pretty.  She invites him inside.

He will not go inside.  We can see they have a history between them.  A history of which Irmgard does not approve.  He does nothing wrong.  He leaves the pears.  He goes back down the stairs.

We do not see her pay him.  Is he distracted?  Is he upset?  Or does the movie just leave out that detail?

Hans and Irmgard are walking down the street, pushing their cart, in cold silence.

She scolds him.  He defends himself.  He did not touch her.  He left the pears and left.  We agree with him.  We saw it.  Irmgard will not stop.

A nagging wife is like a constant dripping on a rainy day. - Proverbs 27:15

Hans has been dripped upon.  For awhile.  He leaves her with the cart and walks into a bar.

She tells her next female customer, "You know how men are."

He says to the bartender, "You know how it is."

They will have another encounter.  He will go into another bar.  He will not come home for dinner.

Irmgard and their daughter Renate wait for him.  They are seated at the table.  She told him dinner would be at 7:00 pm.  She looks at the clock.  It is around 8:45.  She tells Renate they can eat now.  The two ladies finally pick up their silverware and begin eating.

(I want to know if the two of them were really sitting at the dinner table for an hour and forty-five minutes doing nothing, not talking, and not touching their food!  This is called staging.  The director stages the scene to communicate information.  But sometimes it looks staged.  It does not look like real life.  Fassbinder does a lot of that in his films, but if you go along with the artifice and suspend your disbelief then you can follow the story.)

He is at the bar with his buddies.  He tells them how he used to be a police officer and how he lost his job.  We go into a flashback and see why he lost his job.  He says it was fair.  They had to fire him.  What could they do?

We already know he fought for the Foreign Legion.  In the very first scene of the film he came home to his mother after months of being away, only to have her reject him.

How does his past service in the Foreign Legion and in the police department influence how he feels about being a fruit vendor now?

Irmgard calls all the bars until she finds him.  She shows up.  She calls him out in front of his buddies.  She begs him to come home.  He throws a chair at her.

That night he comes home and takes it out on her.  Renate not only sees it but also tries to intervene.

The next morning he awakens and Irmgard is gone.  He looks for her.  He has left her a note.  She is with his family.  He goes.  They take her side.  His mother, brother, and one sister list all of his deficiencies.  His other sister defends him.  He has one defender!

He asks her back.

She calls her lawyer to file for a divorce.

He has a heart attack.

She cheats on him while he is in the hospital.  This appears to go against her nature.  She is a conservative woman.

This is the set up of the movie.  What happens next is not necessarily what you might expect.

Hans and Irmgard pull together.  She has to find a way to help him with the fruit cart after the doctor limits his activities.

The business details are interesting--interviewing help, hiring help, buying a second cart, haggling over its price, selling different fruits, setting prices, moving product, teaching the help how to call out, working on the tone and cadence of the voice, secretly watching the help, settling accounts.

There are moments of hope.

But--

Hans and Irmgard share a romantic evening that goes badly when he misunderstands her.  He puts a song on the record player, which is important to him.  He sang it to her when they were dating.  She laughs.  He takes it personally and allows it to hurt his feelings.  She explains that she laughed because she loved him, that the night he first sang it was the night she knew she wanted to be with him.  She had laughed back then because she thought he was funny, and it was endearing.  He just thinks he is being laughed it.  He turns away from her.

Over the course of the film he will deteriorate.

His sister who believes in him explains to his daughter Renate that he could live if he wanted to.  Renate does not understand that.  How can a person's health be connected to his will power?  How can he choose whether he will live or die?  Aunt Anna explains that people have not always been good to him.  We see that it largely goes back to his mother.  And the words she spoke over him throughout his life.

One gets the impression that the filmmaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is speaking out of his own pain.

We are invited to respond with compassion.

The viewer is put in the position of making a choice.  Is this story about a man who has some misfortunes and for whom we sympathize?  Or does the movie seek to manipulate us into viewing the character--as a psychological projection of the filmmaker--as a martyr?

It is certainly subjectively told.  We know nothing about the other characters beyond how they affect the emotional life of Hans.  The world is seen only through the lens of his feelings.  People are judged, and harshly so, only by how they have treated him.  Their feelings are not considered, let alone their virtues and vices, personality attributes, goals, or even personal lives outside of him.

Everything is an extension of him and how it affects him.

We know that an important part of human growth and development is to mature, or outgrow these feelings that the world revolves around me.  The movement towards love is a movement outside of our own visceral needs and towards thinking about and caring for other people.  By reaching out beyond ourselves, by not allowing our own emotions to dominate us, by focusing on the needs and perspectives of other people, we begin to grow, and we begin to love.  Then we start to see the world more objectively.

But what if Hans is not there yet.  What if he is emotionally underdeveloped due to real verbal and emotional abuse by his mother and now his wife.

What if someone were to look him in the eyes and say, "Hey, man.  You're doing a great job.  You're a good fruit vendor.  I like you.  Keep up the good work."

Everyone wants to be loved.

Love is available to everyone.

If only he can find it.