L'Année des treize lunes

Fassbinder is an emotional extortionist and also a bearer of moral messages, which he presents to his audience with the elegance of a punch or a kick to the stomach. Of course, there is a good amount of truth in what he communicates, but I often have issues with his melodramas, and in this case, it didn't make things any easier for me. His protagonist is indeed a poor soul who deserves sympathy, but at the same time, he is also quite unlikeable, weak, indecisive, and incredibly naive. The film is overly long and some scenes are clumsily shot. Some, on the other hand, are masterfully done but create such a suffocating feeling that it ultimately becomes counterproductive. These include, for example, a long sequence where the camera at the slaughterhouse observes the killing, skinning, eviscerating, and butchering of animals. The director aims to evoke a sense of maximum alienation and disillusionment. He succeeds so well that, from my perspective, a strongly depressive and unpleasant film was created, with an equally unpleasant protagonist who actively works toward his own destruction. While Fassbinder's film is indeed about issues of sexual identity, it is primarily a film about coming to terms with one's past and the past of society as a whole. Overall impression: 40%. (02/12/2009)