a remarkable loser
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer
Werner Fassbinder (writer and director) Händler
der vier Jahreszeiten (The Merchant
of Four Seasons) / 1971
Fassbinder’s
Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmüller), like so many Fassbinder characters, is a kind of
remarkable loser, a man seemingly determined from birth to fail. While some of
these figures live lives of petty thievery and gangster underworld behavior (as
in Love Is Colder than Death, Gods of the
Plauge, The American Soldier),
others are hopeless dreamers (Fox and His
Friends) or simply ordinary men driven to insanity (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? and In
a Year with 13 Moons) by the unaccepting world around them. All of them are
simply attempting to find love in societies seemingly hostile and disinterested
in their definitions of it. On the surface Epp is closer to the central
character of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,
but then none of these “remarkable losers” are quite alike. They are simply all
incapable of living within the confines of post-war German life. 
Epp is perhaps the most commonplace
of these individuals. The son of a domineering bourgeois mother (Gusti Kreissl),
whose husband probably died in World War II, Epp is simply not brilliant enough
to live in the world which his mother and elder sister imagine for him. He
might have made a good mechanic, but his mother will have nothing to do with
people who live what she calls “dirty” lives. She would much better that the “dirt”
be of the intellectual kind like her journalist son-in-law, Kurt (Kurt Raab),
who writes for a Catholic newspaper without truly believing the tenants it
espouses. The only family member who seems to comprehend how they have treated
Epp and loves him despite his shortcomings, is his younger sister Anna (Hanna
Schygulla), an intelligent college-going beauty.
Failing at
his school studies, Epp escapes to the French Foreign Legion, but even there he
fails, as we find out later in the film, when, upon being tortured, he reports
the whereabouts his legion base. His torturer, having gained the information,
is ready to shoot him, but two Legionnaires, observing the scene from nearby, save
Epp. One of the two turns out to now be Epp’s closest friend—and, as in many of
Fassbinder’s films, a kind of surrogate male-lover—Harry (Klaus Löwitsch), who
later moves in with Epp and his wife.
Returning
home from the Legion, Epp is met with utter disdain by his mother, but finds a
decent job, soon after, as a policeman—that is until he is caught receiving a
blow-job from a prostitute he has just arrested. With no other choices
remaining, Epp is forced to take to the streets as a fruit vendor, selling the “Frische
birnen” (fresh pears) with which the film begins. Having been rejected by the “love
of his life” (Ingrid Craven)—again because his employed statuse is below her
family’s standards—Epp is now married to a sensible and forceful woman, Irmgard
(Irm Hermann) Despite providing a working-class living for his wife and
daughter, Renate, however, and being gifted with a full and melodious voice
that draws the neighborhood women to his cart, Epp, it is clear, is still
ashamed of how he makes his living, particularly when called up to deliver
fruit to the woman he once loved, while being carefully watched by his now
somewhat dictatorial wife.
One might
say that Irmgard’s careful watching over of her husband quite literally drives
him to drink, except that, once he begins to become inebriated with his equally
failed friends, we realize that Epp is himself the cause of his own problems.
He simply can’t resist destroying nearly any good thing that so rarely occurs
in his life.
Tracking
him down when he does not return for dinner, Irmgard tries to bring him home
from his drunken binge without success, and when he does return home, he beats
his her brutally (even if Fassbinder presents all blows and slaps in these
early films as melodramatic gestures that symbolize rather than actualize the
real violence of his character’s lives).
Insisting
that she will leave him, Irmgard, with Renate in tow, retreats to Epp’s family,
who, with the exception of Anna, predictably once again take her side against
their own flesh-and-blood. When Epp finally shows up, everyone including the
viewer expects further violence, but Epp is rendered by the familiar wall of
disdain so ineffective that he can only sing a few lines of the ditty that
brought him and Irmgard together, before he falls to floor as a result of a
heart attack. Only Anna has the perspicuity to call for the ambulance, as the
others stand around in in simple startlement.
Visiting her slowly recovering
husband at the hospital, Irmgard swears she will stay with him, but when he is
eventually released, it is clear he can no longer lift the fruit crates or
maneuver the cart; the doctor warns that any serious drinking will immediately
bring about his death.
Somewhat like
Maria Braun in Fassbinder’s 1978 BRD Trilogy piece, Irmgard suddenly springs
into action, suggesting that she take over a permanent vendor stand and that
they hire someone else to handle the cart. She even bargains for a new cart,
while Epp interviews a clearly unqualified immigrant, Anzell (Karl Scheydt)
with whom, unbeknownst to him, his wife has had a sexual encounter during his
hospital stay.
If that
coincidence seems exaggerated, one must recognize that throughout this film,
the director has used all the conventions of melodrama (particularly in the
manner of American director, German-born Douglas Sirk), adding to them the
numerous tableaux and heavily theatrical gestures (such as Anna’s melodramatic
drop to the floor upon hearing of her brother’s decision to join the Foreign
Legion) that also dominate his very next film, The Better Tears of Petra von Kant. These gestures further help, in
their alienation of the audience, to create a temporarily comic or
slightly-camp aura which points away from the realism of the actors while
underlining the film’s dramatic themes.
When Anzell
turns out not only to do a fairly good job as Epp’s fruit-selling replacement
but also honestly reports his sales, which Epp has nefariously watched over
during the day, Irmgard plots to protect herself from the knowledge of her
sexual transgression by suggesting Anzell overprice the fruits and share the
difference with her—all time knowing that her husband will observe the maneuver
and fire him. While the inevitable happens, Anzell retaliates by telling Epp
that he has been sexually involved with his wife.
White Irmgard emphatically denies
the charge, Epp secretly recognizes the truth, and, soon after begins to fall
into depression. Momentarily, he is buoyed up by meeting his old friend Harry,
inviting him into their home and placing him in charge of the cart. But Epp
soon shows even greater signs of depression, staring for hours off into space
through their apartment window, as Harry takes over Epp’s previous help with
Renate’s homework and other daily familial chores.
A would-be
sexual encounter with his “great love” ends with Epp leaving before engaging in
sex; a visit to his sister gives him little pleasure as the student continues
working on a manuscript during their conversation. Bit by bit, we watch the man
stitching together the numerous failures of his life to end, finally, in his
recognition that he would be better off dead. Even Harry had betrayed him, he
perceives, in watching to see if Epp would confess before coming to his
defense.
Dining with
his drunken friends, Epp, one by one, swallows shots of liquor as he toasts to
all the people who have slung arrows into his pain-racked body: mother, sister,
wife, daughter, lover, Harry, and all his would-be “friends.” Predictably, his
had falls to the table, as Harry, coming to his side, reports that Epp is dead.
At the
funeral, Irmgard, practical and sensible as always, suggests that Harry
continue to live with her since it would be better for her daughter, for Harry,
and for herself. The final line of this comically-tinged melodrama of another
of Fassbinder’s “remarkable losers,” is a banal “okay.”
Los Angeles, July 22, 2015
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