BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE aka WARNUNG VOR EINER HEILIGEN NUTTE

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971

Starring: Lou Castel, Eddie Constantine, Marguard Bohm, Hanna Schygulla

At the beginning of a film shoot in Spain, the cast and crew are waiting the arrival of the director. They spend most of their time drinking, doing drugs, and having affairs with one another. The director finally arrives, but terrorizes everyone from his former girlfriend to his set designer and producer. He has moments of kindness or brilliance, but the majority of the time he runs around the set berating his friends or having affairs with their girlfriend. The production is beset with location and financial troubles, while the film’s star, Eddie Constantine playing himself, disagree with the decisions being made about his character. Will the production ever be completed?

Based on the shooting of Fassbinder’s film Whity, this autobiographical, comedic work is one of the best films of his early period and one he considered to be one of the finest of his career. Beware of a Holy Whore is perhaps the strongest example of Fassbinder’s undeniable impulse to make his art autobiographical and his tendency towards intense self-criticism. For while the cast and crew of the film in progress are flawed — selfish, immature, lazy, greedy, and more — the blame for the failure of both the production and the group environment is placed on the director, Jeff. Though Fassbinder acts in the film, Lou Castel (Fists in the Pocket) stars as an idealized version of the director — blonde haired, blue-eyed, “Aryan” looking, and physically fit, he speaks to Fassbinder’s life long frustrations and insecurities with his physical appearance. 

But Jeff repeats many of Fassbinder’s real life behaviors, including numerous bisexual affairs, possessiveness, terrorizing his cast and crew, physically abusing girlfriends like Irm Hermann, and so on. His regular Anti-Theater cast of misfits appear, several of them starring as themselves, including Hanna Schygulla as the lead actress, New German Cinema director Margarethe von Trotta as Jeff’s lover, Ulli Lommel, Kurt Raab, and more. The cult European actor Eddie Constantine appears as himself, as the star of Jeff’s movie. While Constantine got his start playing Lemmy Caution, a hardboiled detective in a series of French films, he was also the star of Godard’s Alphaville. Though by Beware of a Holy Whore, Fassbinder was beginning to move away from early influences like Godard, there’s an undeniable link to the French New Wave director both with the presence of Constantine and in the fact that Beware of a Holy Whore is a counterpoint to Contempt (1963). The latter was Godard’s melodramatic meditation on movie making, which combines a failed marriage with between a young woman and her screenwriter husband, just while his career is finding success.

But while Godard focuses on a disintegrating marriage, Fassbinder’s film examines the failure of group collaboration. Beware of a Holy Whore is one of his funniest films and combines a blend of satire, caricature of Fassbinder and his collaborators, and is a successful work of existential comedy. Something of an advanced version of Katzelmacher, the drama of Beware of a Holy Whore comes from the fact that the group as a whole is bored and dissatisfied. This ennui and aimlessness is further aggravated by being trapped in the villa with drugs, alcohol, sex, and emotional drama. The hotel/villa becomes a claustrophobic prison, which the camera paces anxiously, peering around corners and ceaselessly spying. Like many of Fassbinder’s other films, it balances the drama (in this case comedy) with moments of uncomfortable violence and cruelty, where a vicious slap or an inappropriate sexual encounter is played out before the eyes of all.

One of Beware of a Holy Whore’s greatest achievements, which extends to the early work of Fassbinder in general, is that it both is and isn’t a “gay” film. Fassbinder has many gay or bisexual characters — this extends to nearly all the men in Beware of a Holy Whore — but writes them into the film without calling attention to their sexual orientation or promiscuity. There is something far more natural about the sexual atmosphere of this film than some of the works by his contemporary (or later directors identifying as gay). The mechanism with which he presents the film’s numerous affairs is akin to sleight-of-hand: you see it and it is present, but it also disappears within the film’s larger themes of emotional cruelty, selfishness, and despair. Fassbinder was truly a pioneer in queer cinema, because he refused to elevate typically victimized characters (the later In a Year of 13 Moons is the culmination of this) and sought to prove that gender, race, sexual orientation, and class do not predispose — or hinder — a person from being cruel and manipulative: it is simply part of being human.

This is one of Fassbinder’s most accomplished works to date and comes with a very high recommendation. His long time collaborators Kurt Raab, as art director, and Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer, began to reach new heights with this film and the previous Whity, both of which mark turning points in Fassbinder’s career. To see the trajectory from Katzelmacher to In a Year of 13 Moons, you need look no further than Beware of a Holy Whore, which clearly shows Fassbinder’s development and burgeoning genius. It’s available in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder with Love is Colder Than Death, Katzelmacher, Gods of the Plague, and The American Soldier.