The Merchant of Four Seasons

If I squint, I can see the influence of Douglas Sirk on this Rainer Werner Fassbinder soaper about fruitseller Hans Hirschmüller. He's cast as a failure, because he doesn't live up to the middle-class aspirations of his family. He runs away and joins the Foreign Legion. He returns and joins the police, but is kicked out for consorting with a prostitute. His one true love can't marry him because of his work, although she meets him for assignations. In between, he has a shrewish wife in Irm Hermann, in-laws who despise him, a heart attack, and his gradual erasure from his own life to contend with.

However, while Sirk's most famous work in the 1950s tinges his disapproval of the post-war middle class with sympathy and wonderment at peoples' refusal to admit what they want to to be happy, Fassbinder seems angry and contemptuous of his subjects. Hirschmüller is too passive, Miss Miss Hermann plays the victim card too aggressively, his family arrant, mealy-mouthed snobs, and so forth. There's no one to root for in this. There's nothing tragic about his inevitable destruction, only a sadistic, scolding examination of all that Fassbinder finds wrong with mainstream society.

The Merchant of Four Seasons is prolific, self destructive, German, writer, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first film that brought him international attention along with the movement called New German Cinema. Specializing in melodramas he managed to churn out 44 films before dying from a drug overdose at 37, Merchant being one of his finer efforts.

Hans Epp returns from a stint in the Foreign Legion to a cold mother and detached family. Once a proud policeman, drummed out of the force, he resorts to pedaling fruit from a cart and begins to make a reasonable living. Alcoholism, however dogs him and brings him to dark places.

Fassbinder was a follower of Hollywood director Douglas Sirk and the artifice contained in his colorful melodramas featuring Rock Hudson and a vivid palette. Fassbender does so as well here with some outstanding compositions that moodily jump out at you but his characters (played with a cornered desperation by Hans Hirshmuller and sullen resignation by Irm Hermann ) remain more complex in their take on matters made even more impenetrable by their stoicism.

Uncompromising in its dark viewpoint, a bleak but rewarding watch.

I rented the movie at the local library, since I had years earlier seen Angst Essen Die Seele Auf, and liked it. It started very interesting with Hans Epp returning from a spell with the Foreign Legion, but the first thing his mother told him was how he was a failure and always would be. "Was ist traurig VorMittag ist noch traurig NachMittag" But I found the actors in this movie to be like zombies. It might be that they just depicted a dreary every day life, but I felt midways into the film that I don`t need to have these pictures inside my head, so I pressed the stop button and in stead put on the other film I had rented at the library, an episode of Star Trek Voyager.

Not that this is a bad movie, it was just tragic to watch at the time.

I didn't find this film as accessible as 'Fox & his Friends' but it was a moving portrayal of a typical Fassbinder victim figure, the eponymous barrow-boy, Hans Epp, whose hopes and dreams are eventually crushed by stultifying conformity (family & society). Some of the scenes are exaggerated (the family confrontations) but I particularly liked the sequence where Hans is desperately searching for meaning & comfort; he tries to find some peace in natural surroundings, goes back to his first lost love in order to recapture past feelings (she's only interested in a quick fling before her husband returns) and visits his sister, perhaps the only person who has any degree of sympathy for him, only to find she's too busy with work.

A poignant story of a vulnerable inarticulate man crushed by his mundane surroundings and bourgeoise, middle-class German values obsessed with economic success and a upward mobility that conveniently papers over the cracks of its more disturbing past.

About a man who lives life in a permanent crisis, don't we all these days - captured through portraits and pictures that could stand by themselves in any art gallery. A work of genius by a genius.