The Merchant of Four Seasons Reviews

THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS is one of writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's best and most accessible films. A deceptively simple tale of the spiritual, mental and physical deterioration of a downtrodden fruit vendor, it's a superbly directed and performed piece of satire and a stinging indictment of petit-bourgeois mores. After a year in the Foreign Legion, Hans (Hans Hirschmuller) returns to Germany where he becomes a fruit peddler and is forced into a loveless marriage by his abusive mother. A flashback shows that Hans was formerly a policeman who was dismissed after being caught receiving sexual favors from a woman he arrested. Other flashbacks reveal that he wanted to be an engineer, but was discouraged by his mother, and that the "great love" of his life rejected him because her father disapproved of her dating a pushcart vendor. He now spends his evenings drinking with friends while his wife Irmgard stays home and cares for their daughter Renate. One night, Hans comes home and brutally beats Irmgard in a drunken rage. She goes to his mother and tells her what happened and when Hans shows up to apologize, she calls a lawyer to say she wants a divorce. Hans starts to sing her a love song, then grabs his chest and collapses. Irmgard leaves, picks up a man and takes him home with her, but her daughter walks in while they're having sex. Feeling guilty, Irmgard goes to the hospital, where she's told that Hans had a heart attack and should recover, but must avoid alcohol and heavy work. She tells Hans that she won't leave him, and they decide to hire a worker to help them in their business. After a series of interviews, Hans hires a man named Antil, unaware he's the man Irmgard picked up when Hans was in the hospital. Antil makes advances towards Irmgard, but she's now happy with Hans, and decides to get rid of Antil by tricking him into stealing their profits, knowing that Hans is spying on him. The plan works and Hans fired Antil, then hires an old friend from the Foreign Legion named Harry to be their new employee. The business takes off and Harry gets along great with Irmgard and Renate, but Hans inexplicably falls deeper and deeper into depression. Finally, after a family dinner in which Hans's sister accuses her family of despising Hans and ruining his life, Hans decides to drink himself to death and toasts all his friends and relatives as he downs shot after shot. After the funeral, Irmgard asks Harry to stay with her for the sake of the business and Renate, and he agrees. Fassbinder was a genius at creating comically bleak portraits of alienated losers and their shattered dreams, and THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS is one of his best. It represented a new direction for Fassbinder after years of stylistic experimentation with his "Antitheatre" group, and was his first film to achieve widespread critical and commercial acclaim in his own country. Encompassing pathos--Hans's pitiful existence is relieved only by his drinking and his collection of Italian love songs; black comedy--such as when Hans's daughter asks a nurse if her daddy's going to die and the nurse nonchalanty replies "Everybody dies eventually; some sooner than others"; and social satire--virtually every interior is decorated with paintings of Christ and other Christian symbols, Fassbinder achieves a kind of hyper-realism in which the most banal details of daily existence are built up to tragic proportions. The extreme distancing devices of the director's earlier films are toned done here; ironic detatchment is used to draw the viewer in rather than away from narrative, while Fassbinder's stock company of players manage to engender real sympathy for their pathetic characters, despite their (intentionally) robotic acting styles. Hirschmuller is perfect as the lumpen everyman whose every hope and aspiration is quashed by his vituperative mother and a hypocritical society. At one point, Renate asks her aunt if Hans will recover from his illness and she replies, "He'll live, if he really wants to." Given Fassbinder's own eventual self-destruction, it's easy to see Hans, and the numerous characters like him in the director's other films, as Fassbinder's alter ego. His worldview is unremittingly melancholy and despairing; he tells us that dreams are for fools, there is no such thing as true love, and the only escape from the misery of life is death. What makes his vision so riveting, however, is its brutal honesty, brilliant theatricality, and masterly cinematic execution. (Extensive nudity, sexual situations.)