“What has happened to them in these images, besides the goats that have become theirs, are children who come from far and go far again. They are autistic, mute. They have not found a connection with the consciousness that has developed over thousands and thousands of years of civilisation.
In Antwerp during and after the Nazi occupation, a young woman, Lieve, is torn between her love for two men with opposite ideals: her Flemish nationalist husband Adriaan (Rutger Hauer), who goes off to fight with the German troops on the Eastern front, and a wounded French resistance
How I love your eyes, my friend,
With their radiant play of fire,
When you lift them fleetingly
And like lightning in the skies
Your gaze sweeps swiftly round.
“It seems as if Fassbinder needed to purge his system after In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978), a traumatised remake of Louis Malle’s Le feu follet (1963), chronicling a transsexual depressive’s last days, and inspired by the suicide of Fassbinder’s lover Armin Meier.