Fox and His Friends

Of course, the reality is, Fox has no friends. Rainer Werner Fassbinder himself stars as Fox, a naive, working class homosexual from Munich. He becomes lovers with a more sophisticated, bourgeois man, and then wins the lottery. Soon his lover is suggesting that Fox make an investment in his business. Fox is taken advantage of financially, emotionally, and sexually, and by the end he is penniless and abandoned. It's a downer of a film, but Fassbinder's highly artificial and controlled aesthetic doesn't allow his melodrama to become sentimental or artificial. We sit, we watch. While the film is firmly rooted in the homosexual community, the topic is not controversial sexual politcs, but how love, in a capitalist system, is used to exploit a naive worker. It is sad, and I image one of Fassbinder's more personal films (as if with a filmmaker like Fassbinder, one can even make that judgment).