Love Is Colder Than Death (1969, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) takes what made the Hollywood delinquent films of the 1950s cool and gets rid of everything else about them. What remains is smoking cigarettes, wearing a leather jacket, and acting tough. Yet it also places this conception of cool in more of an everyday real life relatability. At times it even seems to distance itself from the patently convenient moralizing that comes with the crime genre. It feels like an Andy Warhol exercise in the crime aesthetic via a fuck you to what Quentin Tarantino gets so excited about.
The film opens with this great shot of its central protagonist FRANZ, played by Fassbinder himself, sitting reading a paper, when a dude asks him for a cigarette and Franz says no. The dude takes the newspaper Franz’s reading and throws it on the ground. Good one. Franz beats the crap out of him, then goes back to his paper. The tone here is so plain. Boring. But the action explodes from nowhere and it’s funny. It’s cool. It’s dangerous. It’s tough.
Franz is thrown in some place where some group called the syndicate keep forcing him to join. But he refuses. The syndicate is an organization, and if Franz joined he’d belong to a system of criminals. No way. Franz does his own thing. And cares about nothing, which is what makes him so cool as a fictional character. Ulli Lommel is BRUNO, a twerp Franz meets who’s also being held in the building where the syndicate is rounding up potential recruits. Bruno wears a fedora and drives a sedan that looks like it’s from the 1940s, as in he’s playing gangster dress-up.
After Franz is released from the syndicate, Bruno tracks him down. Franz stays in a flat with JOHANNA, played by Hanna Schygulla, who will go on to be the best thing to happen to Fassbinder’s film career. Schygulla is sultry, cute, curvaceous, and perfect in her role here as the woman Franz is pimping out. Pimping her out? In real life not cool. In this movie, very cool.
It’s cool because she and Franz don’t have to have square jobs to make a living. When Bruno finds Franz, he moves in with them. Why? How obnoxious. Later we see Franz arrange for Bruno to get his chance with Johanna. Schygulla is the coolest with her hair and how great her ass looks in those jeans, with leather riding boots, a glass of wine, as a record plays just splays herself out on the rug like she doesn’t have the energy to even care about trying anymore, when Bruno attempts to suck on her breast. And she laughs because he’s such a dork. So Franz slaps her. Franz forces Johanna to sell her body. But she refuses to give Bruno a freebee. Why? Because her feminine intuition tips her off that he's syndicate. Syndicate in this case is code for mainstream commercial genre conventions. Crappy cookie cutter crime movies. Johanna is our surrogate. We are here because we find the same type of movie abhorrent. Status quo.
The movie ends with a heist where we find out Bruno is working for the syndicate. They tell him “Mr Strauss says get rid of the girl.” But Johanna called the cops before the heist and so they shoot Bruno down in the street. And by now we get to fully appreciate exactly how Love Is Colder Than Death isn’t the crime genre movie we might’ve thought it was. Franz never shot anybody. He let Bruno. And why did Franz trust Bruno? Because he wanted a friend? No way. Because the syndicate is mainstream genre bullshit and so is Bruno. When the syndicate couldn’t get Franz, they tried to take the one thing he cares about, his girl. But they can’t. Franz doesn’t even care about her anyway. We care. But we don’t care about Bruno. And after the cops kill him, the couple toss his corpse out of the car and aren’t at all too broke up about it. The last shot of the movie is the car driving away and Johanna tells Franz, “I called the cops.” And he replies, “whore.” It’s truly hilarious in its understatement.
There’s also this thing with the gun. First we see Franz fiddling fondling that pistol as if he’s more interested in the gun than he is in Johanna. And later when Franz is in custody and Johanna strips nude and lays on the bed next to Bruno, he’s fussing with the gun in the same way. But the difference is Bruno shoots people (and gets shot). Franz doesn’t. Lack of affect, affiliation, showing no emotion is cooler than felony violence.
Formally, Love Is Colder Than Death uses many direct reverses between two characters, where they each look directly into the lens. This austere, flat, imposing compositional structure is conducive to Fassbinder’s distancing manner of dialogue, which is very sparse, with long pauses in between sentences and reactions, sometimes delivered by one of the characters staring off in another direction entirely. Being a fan of the later works of Nicolas Winding Refn, especially laughing aloud along with how ridiculously slow the dialogue is in Too Old to Die Young, I have to appreciate how at home this style is in all of Fassbinder’s films—the dude invented it.
Yet despite such a bleak austere aesthetic, this thing is totally hilarious. Not all the time. But there are a few choice moments for sure. The one that proves the most pertinent for what this film achieves as satire is when they’re buying illegal weapons from that dealer, and poking fun at chic overly stylized genre *cough Tarantino* indulgence, when Bruno dramatically close up looks ahead at camera and slowly removes his sunglasses, the dealer says “Why did you take off your glasses?” And anytime a character is gunned down, the film doesn't even try to sell it as believable. No squibs. No smoking gun. Sound effects sound amateurishly inept on purpose.
If anything I think this movie is saying what’s really tough is a character like Franz, who is pressured to sell out his independence, betrayed by some jerk that thought he'd be stupid enough to befriend out of loneliness yet easily discards said traitor like trash because he never really was, and selfishly be honest about using his girl. Fassbinder here has begun his path as master of using artifice to express authentic emotions. Avoiding fake genre confines, fake societal confines, in order to portray the anguish of being yourself. It's setting up one of Fassbinder's largest themes: emotional opportunists, exploiting others to survive. Franz never cared about Bruno, so he uses him like the cheesy crime melodrama plot exploits the emotions of audiences who are gullible enough to let them. And Franz living off Johanna selling her body is Fassbinder living off us the audience by operating on our emotions through his art. As we'll soon see Fassbinder is best suited for audiences whom are emotional masochists.
The film opens with this great shot of its central protagonist FRANZ, played by Fassbinder himself, sitting reading a paper, when a dude asks him for a cigarette and Franz says no. The dude takes the newspaper Franz’s reading and throws it on the ground. Good one. Franz beats the crap out of him, then goes back to his paper. The tone here is so plain. Boring. But the action explodes from nowhere and it’s funny. It’s cool. It’s dangerous. It’s tough.
Franz is thrown in some place where some group called the syndicate keep forcing him to join. But he refuses. The syndicate is an organization, and if Franz joined he’d belong to a system of criminals. No way. Franz does his own thing. And cares about nothing, which is what makes him so cool as a fictional character. Ulli Lommel is BRUNO, a twerp Franz meets who’s also being held in the building where the syndicate is rounding up potential recruits. Bruno wears a fedora and drives a sedan that looks like it’s from the 1940s, as in he’s playing gangster dress-up.
After Franz is released from the syndicate, Bruno tracks him down. Franz stays in a flat with JOHANNA, played by Hanna Schygulla, who will go on to be the best thing to happen to Fassbinder’s film career. Schygulla is sultry, cute, curvaceous, and perfect in her role here as the woman Franz is pimping out. Pimping her out? In real life not cool. In this movie, very cool.
It’s cool because she and Franz don’t have to have square jobs to make a living. When Bruno finds Franz, he moves in with them. Why? How obnoxious. Later we see Franz arrange for Bruno to get his chance with Johanna. Schygulla is the coolest with her hair and how great her ass looks in those jeans, with leather riding boots, a glass of wine, as a record plays just splays herself out on the rug like she doesn’t have the energy to even care about trying anymore, when Bruno attempts to suck on her breast. And she laughs because he’s such a dork. So Franz slaps her. Franz forces Johanna to sell her body. But she refuses to give Bruno a freebee. Why? Because her feminine intuition tips her off that he's syndicate. Syndicate in this case is code for mainstream commercial genre conventions. Crappy cookie cutter crime movies. Johanna is our surrogate. We are here because we find the same type of movie abhorrent. Status quo.
The movie ends with a heist where we find out Bruno is working for the syndicate. They tell him “Mr Strauss says get rid of the girl.” But Johanna called the cops before the heist and so they shoot Bruno down in the street. And by now we get to fully appreciate exactly how Love Is Colder Than Death isn’t the crime genre movie we might’ve thought it was. Franz never shot anybody. He let Bruno. And why did Franz trust Bruno? Because he wanted a friend? No way. Because the syndicate is mainstream genre bullshit and so is Bruno. When the syndicate couldn’t get Franz, they tried to take the one thing he cares about, his girl. But they can’t. Franz doesn’t even care about her anyway. We care. But we don’t care about Bruno. And after the cops kill him, the couple toss his corpse out of the car and aren’t at all too broke up about it. The last shot of the movie is the car driving away and Johanna tells Franz, “I called the cops.” And he replies, “whore.” It’s truly hilarious in its understatement.
There’s also this thing with the gun. First we see Franz fiddling fondling that pistol as if he’s more interested in the gun than he is in Johanna. And later when Franz is in custody and Johanna strips nude and lays on the bed next to Bruno, he’s fussing with the gun in the same way. But the difference is Bruno shoots people (and gets shot). Franz doesn’t. Lack of affect, affiliation, showing no emotion is cooler than felony violence.
Formally, Love Is Colder Than Death uses many direct reverses between two characters, where they each look directly into the lens. This austere, flat, imposing compositional structure is conducive to Fassbinder’s distancing manner of dialogue, which is very sparse, with long pauses in between sentences and reactions, sometimes delivered by one of the characters staring off in another direction entirely. Being a fan of the later works of Nicolas Winding Refn, especially laughing aloud along with how ridiculously slow the dialogue is in Too Old to Die Young, I have to appreciate how at home this style is in all of Fassbinder’s films—the dude invented it.
Yet despite such a bleak austere aesthetic, this thing is totally hilarious. Not all the time. But there are a few choice moments for sure. The one that proves the most pertinent for what this film achieves as satire is when they’re buying illegal weapons from that dealer, and poking fun at chic overly stylized genre *cough Tarantino* indulgence, when Bruno dramatically close up looks ahead at camera and slowly removes his sunglasses, the dealer says “Why did you take off your glasses?” And anytime a character is gunned down, the film doesn't even try to sell it as believable. No squibs. No smoking gun. Sound effects sound amateurishly inept on purpose.
If anything I think this movie is saying what’s really tough is a character like Franz, who is pressured to sell out his independence, betrayed by some jerk that thought he'd be stupid enough to befriend out of loneliness yet easily discards said traitor like trash because he never really was, and selfishly be honest about using his girl. Fassbinder here has begun his path as master of using artifice to express authentic emotions. Avoiding fake genre confines, fake societal confines, in order to portray the anguish of being yourself. It's setting up one of Fassbinder's largest themes: emotional opportunists, exploiting others to survive. Franz never cared about Bruno, so he uses him like the cheesy crime melodrama plot exploits the emotions of audiences who are gullible enough to let them. And Franz living off Johanna selling her body is Fassbinder living off us the audience by operating on our emotions through his art. As we'll soon see Fassbinder is best suited for audiences whom are emotional masochists.
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