JONATHAN BAUMBACH
599
subject of
Fear ofFear
is a woman having a breakdown; the movie seems to
pose the question What Does A Woman Do If She Thinks She's Going
Mad? and seems at times like an adult comic book about mental health. The
movie has a sickly blue green tint, as if everything in it were a life-like plastic
imitation. As an indication that the heroine, Margot, is breaking down, the
room melts under her stare.
It
is as if Samuel Fuller had done a remake of
Bergman's
Persona.
Margot, the only sympathetic figure in the film, lives a
dreary middle-class life with a distracted, boorish husband (or is that merely
her dislocated view of him?) and the pressures of that life would be intoler–
able to anyone. The husband's mother and sister live upstairs and spy on
the erratic heroine, intruding clumsily (as in a soap opera) on her preroga–
tives as wife and mother. The performances-the same actors appear in all
of Fassbinder's films-are naturalistic in contradistinction to the film's pop
art look. Margot moves from Valium to extramarital sex to alcohol as anes–
thetics against her panic.
Fear ofFear
breaks through its distancing devices
at times to touch us with Margot's despair, but only for moments. Influenced
by Godard, though of considerably different temperament, the prolific
Fassbinder is a sophisticated, highly intellectual primitive . For all its seem–
ingly antithetical impulses,
Fear ofFear
is a whole , if odd and disturbing ,
experience .
Seratl,
Eduardo de Gregorio
This first film by the screenwriter, Eduardo de Gregorio
(The Spider'S
Stratagem
and
Celine and Julie Go Boating)
is the kind of provocative
failure that would be unavailable to us without the New York Film Festival.
Seratl
concerns an English novelist looking for a country house in France in
which to write his new book. He is also looking for a subject and he elects to
buy a chateau in elaborate disrepair in order to observe the three beautiful,
role-shifting women who come with the property. The hero discovers that
nothing that he writes about the women withstands the next moment's
contravening reality (the occupants of the house mysteriously shift identities
from scene to scene) and he destroys everything he starts, until the inability
to be certain about what he knows , to write anything he can continue to
believe
is
true, drives him into paralysis. The novelist
is
undone-an odd
poetic justice-by his presumptive subject . The narrative works on the level
of metaphor, though
it
has little urgency as experience. This would seem to
be a damning complaint, but
Seratl
is
full of incidental pleasures, both
intellectual and erotic. There
is
much to be said, particularly when most of
the
ftlms
in current release are interchangeable imitations of former successes,
for serious and original work of overreaching ambition.
