Händler der vier Jahreszeiten [The Merchant of Four Seasons] (1972)

(On Cable TV, May 2022) Ugh, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  I’ll watch his films to complete his filmography, but I’m not promising that I’ll enjoy them. While I did like The Merchant of Four Seasons more than usual for his films, it was often out of a sense of fascination for the weird choices he makes throughout it all. The story of a fruit cart merchant who struggles to provide for his family soon spins into melodramatic extremes as he beats his wife, she cheats on him, he ends up hiring the man who slept with her, both of them start plotting against our protagonist, and things escalate from there. It’s filled with curious filmmaking choices– even allowing for the restrained nature of German films, the actors here seem content in delivering flat line-readings in what could appear like a parody of melodramatic acting. In other words, while I found something interesting in The Merchant of Four Seasons, it was a sense of fascination with how it was turning out than any real immersion in the film’s reality. Compared to my flatter-than-flat reaction to other Fassbinder films, that’s almost an improvement.