Rio das Mortes
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Year Released: 1971
Rating: 2.0
Two laborers (Michael König and Günther Kauffmann) live the infantile dream of going to Peru (?) to live and search for buried treasure (??) and maybe run a cotton farm (???) with land they purchase, which irritates the hell out of the one worker's girlfriend (Hanna Schygulla). Slapdash even by Fassbinderian standards (it looks like it was recorded with a junky Super 8 camera), I can't imagine how this played on German television (which it was made for), although it does carry with it the usual Fassbinderian theme of brutish man-children trying to find easy fixes to their depression and the women they abuse and neglect. Schygulla, all too aware of RWF's ideas, makes her neglected lover seem both pathetic and pitiable: when she is unable to shoot the two fools about to make their way onto the airplane to Get the Hell Out of Germany, it shows just how powerless she really is (best put on that lipstick, the boys aren't coming back).
