Customer Reviews

In a Year With 13 Moons

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This film is a masterpiece because of the way it challenges viewers: it refuses to be mere escapist entertainment as so many movies are. It bleakly confronts the way the legacy of the holocaust in Germany and the alienation of modern capitalism have turned people into soulless machines: love is impossible, a real life of honest emotion becomes unlivable. The main character, Elvira Weishaupt, is a lonely, forgotten soul who is kicked around and ignored by the rest of the world; what gives her life meaning is that she once loved someone passionately enough to change her entire life and identity for him, which, nonetheless, did not make any difference at all. Fassbinder mourns, in this film, the violent mysterious deaths of two previous lovers, El Hedi Ben Salem and Armin Meier; he bears witness to the crushing collapse of the utopian dreams of free love and personal liberation that marked the 1960's. This is one of Fassbinder's most intellectual films (Schopenhauer, Kafka and Sartre are all explicitly referenced) but it's also one of his most human and heartfelt, using great music (Mahler, Roxy Music, Connie Francis) to express the bittersweet longings of the main character. This is a nihilist statement that can actually make people appreciate life -- Utopia is what we all make of it, and everyone is an "outsider" in one way or another.

This film is a bit difficult to watch. On one hand, this film features a few scenes that are almost unwatchable. There are long monologues, graphically violent visuals, and many characters (like the Nun in the courtyard) who seem automated, like wind-up toys. On the other hand, I cannot deny that after 3 viewings, this is one of the most significant films Fassbinder ever made. This film is meant to be difficult to watch. It throws cinema back at the audience. There are characters in the film who are representive of the audience (voyeurs, for example). There are post-modern quotations of film, especially the highly disturbing and somehow funny scene in which the executive is imitating Jerry Lewis a he watches a Lewis movie on television. But these are just details. I urge anyone who has in interest in Fassbinder to see this movie. You might love it. You might hate it. But you may never forget what you see...

Despite the flaws of '13 Moons,' I still believe that this is one of Fassbinder's best films. Part of that conclusion is of course the understanding that every Fassbinder film has flaws. But I judge films on how effective they were in telling a story and how effective they are in making me think. And this film still has a strong impression on me 10 years after seeing it last. For me, the film is best understood during the skyscraper sequence. We have an unknown character peeping through a keyhole in an abandoned office tower and laughing hysterically. That of course, is Fassbinder's little jab at the audience, as we are all voyeurs. Later, we see an executive playing a kind of "movieokie" / imitation of a Jerry Lewis sequence on television. A total carbon copy of a preexisting text, done in the twisted humorous style that only Fassbinder can deliver. We later see that same executive subject himself to a staged kidnapping drill by his security staff, which places the film in historical context as left-wing terrorists attacked CEO's during the 1970's. And finally, we see a man hang himself in an abandoned suite. It is over the top, unrealistic, and I'm sure it is torture for most viewers (if they weren't driven out by the early slaughterhouse scene), but it is still a masterpiece as it is a compelling example of post-modernism in the true sense. If you are a student of New Wave or Avant Garde cinema, 13 Moons is a must-see. I can't convince you that it is a masterpiece. You just have to see it for yourself. It ranks with "The American Soldier," "The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant," "Love is Colder than Death," "Chinese Roulette," and "Fox and his Friends," as Fassbinder's best works. If you want to see the darkest work of art to come of out West Germany in the late 1970's, this is it.

I initally saw this in a really poor VHS transfer from New Yorker Video, but obviously, the DVD is much better. This, along with Berlin Alexanderplatz, are my favorites of Fassbinder's work. There is such a strange, haunting quality to this film, from the early strains of Mahler's 5th symphony, 4th movement at the beginning (which is one of the most majestic pieces ever recorded, and one of my favorite symphonies that moves me to tears at times) that haunts the film to the very end. Even though it's about a transgender woman being jilted by her lover (the man she got the sex change for), her struggle for love is universal, which is why you can identify with it so strongly. It's incredibly sad, yet funny in spots too (much like life). It's one of Fassbinder's most complex films (which is saying something), and certainly one of his top 5 films. He made over 40 features in a 13 year time span (including miniseries and shorts), and he would probably be still going today if he didn't die of a drug overdose. I miss the ambition and the deep artistry of Rainer, whose films still haunt me (and us) today.

The DVD has some excellent interviews with those who worked on this film and with Rainer on many occasions. They talk about him with great feeling as if he were still alive today (in many ways, he is, as his work lives on). But you can skip Richard Linklater's tedious, self indulgent, and completely unrehearsed introduction. Linklater says a few interesting things, but he ends up coming across like a film professor who doesn't really understand Fassbinder's film except from an academic, overly intellectual point of view, and he talks about himself WAY too much.

Just only a very few filmmakers in cinema ' s story have had the supreme virtue of treat th human being with such load of affection, respect and indulgency no matter the circumstances of religious, social, racial or psychological orders we talk.

Fassbinder literally embraced and loved the human being, and he dared to present many unsaid realities of universal repercussions. This awful and penetrating movie deals around a sex change of a man who tries to please his male lover, and then to be abandoned and deal with this stigma against the world.

An awful and incisive film which demands all your possible attention. It is not an easy going picture which anticipated itself by far to many actual issues.

Yes this film is full of hard-to-watch scenes like the slaughterhouse sequence, but what has not been mentioned is the wit and humor of the piece. Beginning with the openning scene in which a bunch of hustlers beat up the heroine because she is not a gay man, Fassbinder pulls a series of reversals and twists on what is expected. There are also amusing visual incongruities such as Elvira and Zora in their full femme outfits visiting slaughterhouses and convents.

The strong emotional impact of this film cannot be separated from Fassbinder's usual humor, which puts the character's pain into a larger perspective.

Like all Fassbinder films I've seen, it's unpredictable, honest, and revealing. It gets the third star simply for an entirely new character like Erwin/Elvira. But what is the message here? Some people are hopelessly damaged? Reach out a helping hand even though it's futile? What are the feelings that led him to get the sex change? What was the real history of Erwin and Anton? How were his wife and daughter so entirely irrelevant? What gave him this emotional connection to this old business partner that no one else did? What were his hopes, dreams, or regrets?

If you're going to create such a fringe character to draw out the themes of emotional pain, lonliness, and isolation, the audience needs to know more about him than a horrible childhood history and vague clingy instincts to anyone who shows any kind of approval. I have no doubt that people this broken and desperate exist. I just feel they would have more to express. The early cattle slaughterhouse scene goes on WAY too long. We GET the symbolism of mutilation and doom. Reinforcing this more is like strapping the viewer to a torture table. Fassbender's Eva Braun and Petra Van Kant showed us infinitely more about themselves.

Is this the most aesthetically balanced and lush of Fassbinder's films? Perhaps. In a Year of 13 Moons is a singularly unique study of a transvestite's slow and painful disintegration. Through an interplay of comic self-consciousness and oblique representations of the tragic, Fassbinder's characters manage to radiate above the surface of his simple schema. Also, there are extraordinary passages of internal narration-in particular at the slaughterhouse. This film claws its way around its material and culminates with a magnificent resolution of its tragic elements.

It is a story of a semi-orphaned bi-sexual boy having a daughter fathered just to "change gender" in Morocco to unsuccessfully please a co-student-millionaire with dare consequences for a male in a woman body - and vice versa.

Given the time of producing, legal grounds for such metamorphosis are unclear even nowadays.

It is a third movie of a three DVD Fassbinder Foundation set (firs two are "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" and Fox and His Friends).

The movie should have been called "Despair" had Fassbinder himself not made the film with that title just before "In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden" (1978) which was very personal for the writer/director who had to come to terms with his lover's suicide. This drama follows the last few days in the life of Elvira - Erwin Weisshaupt. Several years back, Ervin underwent the sex change operation in hopes to win love of the man he loved. It did not help him to make Anton love him and it did not make him happier. It may sound beautiful, "I'll do anything for love, I'll be anything you want me to be" but by trying to be someone else, a person simply loses his/her own identity, becomes lonely and desperate and has no way out.

The movie is the most touching, moving, powerful and devastating Fassbinder ever made - it is impossibly difficult to watch at times but it does not make it a bad movie. The acting is fantastic by everyone; the directing is tight and Fassbinder is always in control taking movie from its melodramatic roots to the heights of pure tragedy, never been over-sentimental and even providing some humor. The choice of music with the references to "Death in Venice" (eternal and never fulfilled longing) and to Fellini's "Amarcord" (looking back at one's life trying to find the roots in the childhood, to understand how and why the things happened the way they did) makes the film even more compelling.

Warning: there is a scene in the slaughterhouse which is almost unbearable to watch. It is the very important scene but be prepared for it. It does not spare any details of the job done and in its emotional impact is as horrifying as "The Blood of the Beasts" (1949), the short documentary by Georges Franju.