Fox and His Friends

Make it a double feature with Poison and save!

Rainer Werner Fassbinder himself starred in this bleak moral fable, the 20th film he’d directed in the span of six years. Fox is a déclassé, leather-clad carnival entertainer who becomes a prime target for predatory suitors after he wins the lottery, and his Sade-esque journey from lumpenprole afterthought to exploited and discarded piece of meat becomes one of the great tragedies of European cinema. Haynes and Fassbinder share much more than a love for Douglas Sirk, and it was in the desperate, operatic movies the great German director made during the second half of his brief career that Haynes found one of his most important filmmaking models—a lesson, to use Manny Farber’s words, in “pushing melodrama to its absurd limits to show how its clichéd attitudes and emotions discolor normal situations.” An NYFF13 Selection.