Inverting the sex of the characters for Deux, Schroeter seemingly follows in the footsteps of his ill-fated friend Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) aka Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant – a work based on the auter’s failed romantic relationship with black Bavarian Günther Kaufmann, except with lesbians substituting for gay men – but the decidedly decadent auteur has never made a lie about the fact that his films are byproducts of his failed love affairs and if it were not for the fact that he was a singular filmmaker whose cinematic career is unparalleled, one would assume he had a failed life, at least judging by his celluloid autobiography; a work riddled with sex, death, and self-destruction of the cultivated kitschy and sometimes tragicomedic sort. Centering around two identical twins separated at birth who know of neither's existence, Deux seems to be a combination of Poe-esque ‘fear of the doppelgänger’ and Jungian ideas like the shadow aspect (unconscious aspect of the personality that the conscious ego does not recognize) and the anima (feminine inner personality in the unconscious of the male, which Schroeter seemed rather conscious of), thus the murderous conclusion acts as a sort of complete idiosyncratic “individuation.” The fact that both of the twins, Magdalena and Maria (both played by Huppert), never physically age (whether playing a 5-year-old or a 50-year-old version of the character) and that the events in their lives become quite indistinguishable and all the more indecipherable as the film progresses only make it all more clear that Deux is a torrid trip throughout Schroeter’s totally tortured and terrified unconscious and oftentimes irrational mind, thus making him more of a ‘German’ filmmaker than he would ever want to admit, at least in the dark romantic sense where the auteur gazes into the abyss and the abyss gazes back. Like the twins of sin, sordidness, and sorrow, their seemingly manic mother Anna (Bulle Ogier), who likely fornicated with a sailor and spawned two heirs that were irreparably severed and brought up by separate adoptive families, longs for maternal love and a lasting romantic relationship (their failure with both seems interconnected), but all three ladies are accursed matrons of misery and isolation-based misanthropy with a propensity for damningly destructive love affairs and emotional and physical violence. Maria is the more extroverted of the two as someone who actively pursues ‘revolutionary’ politics and her love of music via debauched opera and cabaret, thus symbolizing Schroeter’s identity as an artist (or his self-created ‘persona’) while Magdalena – a successful school girl turned low-spirited lesbian with a disdain for men – is the director (who, indeed, like the character, attended international boarding schools) as his truest and most unflatteringly personal self, so naturally when the two finally collide physically at the conclusion through their intrinsic metaphysical bond, there are deplorable, if not entirely inevitable consequences. That ‘Magdalena’ is Schroeter’s most personal self becomes all the more clear with the cinematic recreation of the filmmaker’s tragic real-life coming-of-age love affair, which the director described as follows in the documentary Mondo Lux : The Visual Universe of Werner Schroeter (2011) directed by Elfi Mikesch (cinematographer of Deux), “Siegfried was the first man I really loved, but he hanged himself. He was 16, and I was 13 or 14.” Despite the rather ambiguous conclusion (as well as the film as a whole) of Deux, Werner Schroeter will undoubtedly be remembered as the 'artist' (outside persona), albeit one whose highly inner and intimate yet fuddled blood and tears stain every frame he ever shot of celluloid. Deux is indubitably Schroeter at the height of his hyper hermetic yet particularly personalized artistry in a considerably compelling and compulsively concocted celluloid work of daunting and deranging fragmentation where byproducts of love and death act as a fierce form of all-consuming cognitive dissonance and despair, thus it should be no surprise that the filmmaker once also stated in Mondo Lux, “harmony does not exist unless you work hard to create it.”
Featuring hundreds of distinct tableaux ranging from quite literally killer kitsch, including Isabelle Huppert dressed in Soviet regalia standing on a battlefield with hundreds of dead naked corpses, to gross-out absurdity, including Huppert being violently attacked by a fox, coupled with a meticulously dismembered (non)narrative that is intentionally impossible to follow in terms of both chronology (skipping in between the years 2000, 1955, 1977, 1963, 1993, 1981, etc. without warning or reason) and plot, Deux makes for Werner Schroeter’s celluloid magnum opus of melancholy in the macabre tradition of the Grand Guignol and German romanticism, albeit in a highly deracinated, dissonance-driven form. A work of cultivated and complex despair and dispiriting decay that makes concessions to no one except Werner Schroeter himself, Deux, a depiction of debilitating delirium in celluloid form, is the thing that dead dreams are made of. A cinematic work I cannot even recommend to the most courageous of cinephiles, Deux is a totally trying test in terror and torment sprinkled with Schroeter’s apparent disdain for the Zionist state of Israel and goofy Japanese tourists, love of Dutch painters like Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh, antinatalism, radical politics and sex, the semen of seamen, megalomaniacal divas, and lifelong obsession with opera. With the debauched, deadbeat mother featured in Deux telling someone on a public telephone that, “We must murder all pregnant women…We must kill all the children before they’re born. We must take this hunt to all the world. We must! We Must!,” in a most heated, hysterical, and flagrantly fanatical fashion, one can only guess the source of Schroeter’s reckless weltschmerz, but considering he was born 7 April 1945 – literally a month and a day before Germany’s unconditional surrender during the Second World War – thus literally coming of age in apocalyptic Teutonic year zero, it is no surprise that his cinematic swansong, This Night (2008) aka Nuit de chien, is about the death of a nation and a people in one night. And so it would follow that Schroeter became a rootless cosmopolitan of sorts, but as Deux demonstrates, there is no getting away from home, no matter where one runs. Who knows, maybe if Germany had won the war, Schroeter might have grown up to be a hyper heterosexual following in the footsteps of Veit Harlan – a true purveyor of aristocratic National Socialist kitsch – but instead he realized what his friend Fassbinder prophesied as having, “a place in the history of film that I would describe in literature as somewhere between Novalis, Lautréamont, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline," which is no small accomplishment, with Deux being his “Les Chants de Maldoror”; an inexplicable and uncategorizable work of aesthetic anarchy and unwavering idiosyncrasy that will prove to perplex both cinephiles and auteur filmmakers for generations to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment