The great German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was no Alfred Hitchcock, in that he did not stick himself gratuitously into every movie he made. He did, however, appear in a lot of his own movies, so if you’re a Fassbinder freak you can amuse yourself by observing his insouciant brutishness on camera.
Fassbinder did act in other people’s movies on occasion. I didn’t know until recently that Fassbinder’s last starring role occurred in an amusing cyberpunk “thriller” (ahem) called Kamikaze ‘89 directed by a close friend of his named Wolf Gremm. The movie was released in 1982 but (as the title suggests) is set in far-off 1989, when Germany has become a totalitarian dystopia in which all problems are purported to have been solved (there hasn’t been a suicide in four years) and “everything is green,” whatever that means. The mandated diversions of the “bread and circus” formulation come in the form of state-sponsored “laughing contests.” In this edenic setting we follow a police lieutenant named Jansen (played by Fassbinder) who is trying to solve a string of murders mysteriously connected to an all-powerful conglomerate (“der Konzern”) which is run by a man calling himself the Blue Panther.
Introduced working on his squash game, Jansen wears a red shirt and a wonderfully garish leopardskin jacket in every single scene. (In this Germany alcohol is banned but he scores a furtive swig whenever he gets the chance.) Kamikaze ‘89 features plenty of faces familiar from Fassbinder’s work, including Fassbinder staple Günther Kaufmann as well as Brigitte Mira, the female lead of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. The plot of the movie is confusing (possibly just confused), but even if the project was a lark Gremm still did a pretty admirable job of adapting Swedish author Per Wahlöö’s 1964 dystopian novel Murder on the 31st Floor.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot: in addition to certain passages from The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini, all of the music is composed by Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream. (Yes, the soundtrack is available.) The high point of the movie, in fact, comes about halfway through, when Jansen is investigating on the rooftop of a tall skyscraper and beholds the misty cityscape of Berlin, scored to one of Froese’s endlessly mesmerizing melodies.
Godard’s Alphaville is the ur-text for futuristic crime movies, of course, and the general territory of Kamikaze ‘89 cannot fail to call to mind various movies by David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, although I kept thinking of Repo Man and Tapeheads too. Of course the movie that it wanted to be (without any way of knowing it) is Blade Runner, which in a quirk of synchronicity had its US premiere about three weeks before Kamikaze ‘89 was unveiled to West German audiences. Sadly, Fassbinder passed away of a drug overdose at the age of 37 about two weeks before Blade Runner opened.
Kamikaze ‘89 is not a great movie or even necessarily a very good one, but it is certainly a curio worth 90 minutes of your time. Some years ago DM contributor Marc Campbell called it a “stylish mess” and that’s certainly the case. It has something of the cheeky quality of one of John Waters’ movies. It’s easy to imagine Fassbinder phoning in his performance or otherwise winking to the camera, but that is precisely, impressively what he does not do. It’s a pretty legit performance, and Fassbinder has considerable charisma onscreen.
One final note: If you are watching the movie on DVD, be sure to click on John Cassavetes’ audio featurette—I wish to hell someone would upload it to YouTube. You will not soon forget it. You can buy the DVD or you can watch it online for a manageable fee.
Here’s the theatrical trailer that accompanied the recent 4K restoration:
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Debbie Neon: The Talking Heads/Fassbinder connection
Bowie meets Fassbinder in an Italian disco on Mars