Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder came close to making a movie without any help in the "In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden in 1978 (a year with 13 full moons, BTW). Book, screenplay, direction, cinematography, editing, set direction (and more) are credited to him. Pretty much everything except performing (he couldn't be on both sides of the camera at the same time). The on-screen despair was enacted (superlatively) by Volker Spengler, playing a former butcher named Erwin who turned into Elvira after telling a fellow butcher, Anton Saitz (Gottfried John) that he loved him and being flippantly told, "Too bad you're not a girl!" Off Erwin went to Casablanca to be transformed (though he had a loving wife and adoring daughter and no background of feeling like a woman or loving men...). An irrevocable decision he started regretting almost at one. Now, years later, he is alone. His wife does not want him moving back, his daughter is about to go off to school. His most recent lover calls him a "fat, stupid cow" and leaves. Elvira goes to see Anton Saitz, who has become very rich in running a bordello like a concentration camp and then in real-estate speculation. Saitz is pretty wacky, re-enacting Jerry Lewis's part in a production number from "You're Never Too Young." Saitz eventually remembers Erwin, but still is not sex (let alone love!) with his former workmate.

Elvira has a hooker friend Zora (Ingrid Caven) who tries to help by going to the nun-run orphanage where Erwin grew up and eliciting a painfully bleak story from Sister Gudrun (Lieselotte Pempeit, Fassbinder's real-life mother) of the childhood that he/she had blocked out of memory for very good reasons. Zora is even less helpful to Elvira with Anton Saitz... A news reporter has extracted what he wants from Elvira and is too slow to see her desperation when she asks to talk to him more.

Sound bleak? There is some black humor, but it is a movie about despair. (Fassbinder directed a movie with that title, from Nabokov's novel.) Elvira is trying to figure out how to save her life, but cannot get work or even paid-for companionship. Fassbinder made the movie after an ex-lover of his (Armin Meier, who had appeared in "Despair" and six other Fassbinder movies) had killed himself on Fassbinder's birthday, shortly after their breakup. Devastated by Meier's suicide, after emerging from near-catatonia Fassbinder wrote very sad stories for the multiply abandoned character Erwin/Elvira. Knowing of the behind-the-camera guilt does not make the portrait of humiliation any easier to take!

Unfortunately, these stories (and some other forlorn characters') are told rather than shown, Very little—other than the Jerry Lewis re-enactment by Anton Saitz, Elvira, and Saita's flunkies—happens onscreen. There is movement. Elvira moves about behind a man telling his own Anton Saitz story; there is intercutting between Elvira and a man about to hand himself; the nun clomps around the courtyard while telling Zora about Erwin's childhood. (I should have counted to see if she made 13 circuits...) There is also camera movement, especially in a scene in which Elvira shows Zora a slaughterhouse, while reciting Goethe with increasing hysteria. (The slaughterhouse is far more gruesome than the only one I ever visited. The sequence that had drove some audience members to faint and others to run screaming from the theater on the movie's original release. In the introduction to the movie for the DVD Richard Linklater advises those who cannot take the images to focus on the subtitles, which is aided by the increasing speed of Elvira's recitation.)

There is a lot of background television (including a news segment on Pinochet restoring order to Chile, followed by a tv interview of Fassbinder), and the very irregular orbit of a tennis ball in Anton Saitz's office. (I'm pretty sure it does not make 13 orbits.) The low point of the movie for me is the visit to Soul Frieda (Walter Bockmayer) who tells of a dream of visiting a cemetery with very brief durations on the head stones. These are not the dates of birth and death but the duration of true friendship in the people's lives. (No one ever accused Fassbinder of being too subtle!)

The psychological dismemberment of Elvira in "13 Moons" recalls that in "Fox and His Friends" in which Fassbinder himself played the not-very-bright working-class who is destroyed by the man he loved but who did not love him. "Fox" seems even bleaker to me, but shows rather than tells the brief rise and total fall of Fox, so is by my standards a better movie, though some see "13 Moons" as the greatest of Fassbinder's movies or the greatest of the melodramas of his middle period. I don't, but it mostly held my attention. And there is something almost magical about Elvira becoming the center of the universe with all her significant others in some sense in orbit around her at the end, or at least gathered around her corpse.

(And although the echoes of Douglas Sirk are obvious throughout Fassbinder's work and were discussed by him, the love of mirror shots and spiral staircases, the alienating corridors, and the portrayal of gratuitous human cruelty also seem to me to owe more than a little to Fritz Lang. The alternation of underlit grime and supersaturated color that was typical of the German New Wave, however, links to Sirk. I don't mean to suggest anyone else was Fassbinder's prime influence.)

The DVD has many extras. In addition to Richard Linklater's introduction, there is an insight-filled memoir by Julianne Lorenz, Fassbinder's editor and long-time friend, who also provides commentary on seven scenes, and another freewheeling memoir (also touching on conversations he had with Douglas Sirk and Romy Schneider) by director and long-time friend Werner Schroeder (who played a prominent role in "The Merchant of Four Seasons" with Fassbinder), and a helpful booklet essay by Robert Kolker.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age