Now this 15-hour-plus epic runs at 25fps, as per the original German TV broadcast.
This is on of Fassbinder’s most penetrating examinations of the social challenges of extending and receiving true, uncompromised empathy.
Criterion presents this rediscovered Fassbinder mindbender in a luxe Blu-ray transfer.
The film is like an ocean: vast and deep, for sure, but also internally turbulent, its tides ebbing and flowing, constantly lapping against its barely-there borders.
To his credit, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s highly problematic directorial intentions don’t emerge from the literal nowhere.
The similarities between this absurd tragicomedy and Buñuel’s Él, itself a precursor of sorts to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, are unavoidable.
The great irony here is that the film’s victimizers exhibit the very uncivilized behavior they see in Emmi’s marriage to Ali.
Fox and His Friends is first and foremost a riveting evocation of social Darwinism in action.