Enfant Terrible
Here it is: The 55th installment in our ongoing column on what to watch and where to watch it. This week we’ve got two films now available via video on demand — a Rainer Werner Fassbinder biopic and some classic ’70s airplane camp. As always, look back at past issues of the Scene for more recommendations of what to stream: March 26, April 2, April 9, April 16, April 23, April 30, May 7, May 14, May 21, May 28, June 4, June 11, June 18, June 25, July 2, July 9, July 16, July 23, July 30, Aug. 6, Aug. 13, Aug. 20, Aug. 27, Sept. 3, Sept. 10, Sept. 17, Sept. 24, Oct. 1, Oct. 15, Oct. 29, Nov. 5, Nov. 11, Nov. 26, Dec. 3, Dec. 17, Jan. 6, Jan. 21, Jan. 28, Feb. 4, Feb. 11, Feb. 18, Feb. 25, March 11, March 18, March 25, April 1, April 8, April 15, April 22, April 29, May 13.
Enfant Terrible via video on demand
Remember when Bohemian Rhapsody came out and it was a quilt that totally betrayed the genius and sexual adventurousness of its subject, julienning the actual truth to make a palatable casserole of unchallenging moments? Well, Enfant Terrible — Oskar Roehler’s biopic about legendary German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder — takes the opposite approach. Fassbinder was a brilliant writer and director, and his film, theater and television creations are enduring works well worth exploring for anyone who likes pitiless dissection of the human condition, as well as landmarks in queer representation. But he was also a selfish, insecure bully who delighted in breaking the wills of friends and lovers alike while hoovering a heroic amount of cocaine and barbiturates and falling into destructive relationships with what would end up a sizable body count.
As RWF, Oliver Masucci (you might know him from Netflix’s Dark) commits fully, leading with the gut and the bile duct as he tears the supporting cast asunder. Though Fassbinder died at the age of 37, casting an actor in his early 50s works — time does the stunt work and makeup effects for a life devoted to art and sex and drugs. Moments from “life” play out on sets derived from Fassbinder’s other films, crafting a timespace where past and present flow between one another.
The films are legendary works absolutely worth your time and attention (personal faves: World on a Wire, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Like a Bird on a Wire, Jailbait and Fox and His Friends). As they blend together, slipping in and out of RWF’s life like those he’s betrayed in the past, Roehler and his cast (particularly actual RWF/Herzog leading lady Eva Mattes as Ali’s Brigitte Mira, Antoine Monot Jr. as Peter Berling and Jochen Schropp as the tragic Armin Meier) move beyond traditional biopic tropes into something that feels like a portrait written in the spasms of nerves and sculpted out of pain.
If it’s not up to the level of Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent (still the best biopic of the past 20 years and easily one of the greatest films of the 21st century), it shares with that film a fearlessness in telling defiantly queer stories, and if it pulls back on the details, it paints the corrosive mood expertly.
Enfant Terrible will be available on demand via all the usual on-demand options June 15, but for now you can stream it via L.A.’s Laemmle Theatres’ virtual screening room (laemmle.com).
Airport 1975 via video on demand
There was a time when an airplane-related suspense picture was not just a tried-and-true subgenre that rolled in heaps of money — they occasionally even got nominated for Oscars. And then when Airplane! came out in 1980, it did to that entire genre what Bruce Campbell after Evil Dead II did to Bruce Campbell before Evil Dead II — that is, make it impossible for audiences to take them seriously anymore. Sure, there’s the Turbulence franchise (which is more a serial-killer/slasher series that unfolds in the aviation milieu) and Snakes on a Plane (which is an actual internet-comment-section tulpa), but even 40 years on, it’s impossible to imagine taking a cast-of-a-dozen-stars airplane drama seriously because of the impact Airplane! had. So 1974’s Airport 1975 is exactly the kind of camp riot you would want if you wanted to scientifically explore how ’70s one could get in less than two hours.
Karen Black is a flight attendant in a sketchy relationship with Charlton Heston. She is dealing with institutionalized foolishness at every level of her life, so when her flight out of Washington, D.C., collides with a small two-man aircraft that leaves a hole in the cockpit and kills or incapacitates the senior flight crew, she’s got to bring order to the skies. Along for the ride are Myrna Loy, Erik Estrada, George Kennedy (the defining presence of all the ’70s airplane crisis pictures), Large Marge herself Alice Nunn (with no lines but with an emotional support dog long before such a thing was a mainstream concept), a drunk Jerry Stiller who’s literally passed out during the whole crisis, Linda Blair having kidney failure, Norman Fell (America’s favorite strip club manager from Stripped to Kill as well as Three’s Company’s Mr. Roper) as a drunk lech, Helen Reddy as a singing nun, and Hollywood legend Gloria Swanson as herself (she wrote her own dialogue, and seems to know exactly the movie she’s in — like Gina Gershon in Showgirls).
Anyway, it’s all about Karen Black, who’s battling embedded industry sexism and the trifling expectations of everyone around her. Karen Black can handle anything, and it’s really annoying when the film decides to spend half an hour with her wilting under pressure. She still emerges from this mess with dignity and steely reserve, like a slightly softer Mary Woronov. As a bonus, Airport 1975 comes with its own built-in drinking game, where you have a drink whenever you recognize a trope that Airplane! later popularized. The process photography is fascinating, still somehow more real than modern CG everything, and the idea of using a helicopter to lower someone into the jagged hole on the side of a plane careening toward the Rocky Mountains generates some tension that overrides the cornier tendencies of the script. But rest assured, if intentional comedy doesn’t do it for you, you could do worse than Airport 1975 or its even-more-ridiculous follow-ups. Karen Black, however, followed this up with Robert Altman’s Nashville — elusive, triumphant as ever.
