This movie absolutely sucked, which is kind of funny considering how unimpeachably good fassbinder became.
He managed to capture some intriguing chemistry between his characters, and at least two of the overly-long and over-directed shots managed to communicate something of note (thinking of the woozy, nauseous synthesizer augmented soundtrack to an absurdly long shopping trip)
But really just a bad piece of juvenalia.
Beautiful, wrenching. I know nothing about the filming process, but it felt like an intimate collaboration between Laura Poitras and Nan Goldin. This is probably because Goldin herself is a master documentarian, so the movie is as much a carrier of her artistic accomplishments as it is a subject documentary. Humbled to say that I was only a passingly familiar with Nan Goldin and her work/activism prior to watching the film, but that I'm grateful to be introduced to her…
Distant, intimate, affecting, grotesque. I want to say something like 'everything is understated about this movie except the gore and Marlene Clark,' but that's not true. Everything is saturated with a rich symbolic resonance and a blackened irony. It's really Duane Jones' character, and Bill Gun's penchant for fragmented cuts and, "naturalistic" dialogue (thinking of Personal Problems) that are understated.
