Fox and his friends = Faustrecht der freiheit

The only one of Fassbinder’s films to explicitly centre on gay male relationships, this film tells the story of a young, working class, unemployed lottery winner who is exploited, with tragic consequences, by his new-found ‘middle class’ friends. This is one of the director’s best socially critical melodramas, focussing on a victim who conspires in his own victimisation, and using the framework of a love story to lay bare the mechanisms of class exploitation. The film’s avoidance of specifically gay issues, and its bleak representation of gay lifestyles, outraged many in the gay community at the time of its release. Now, however, Fassbinder’s presumption that gay men are fundamentally the same as everyone else looks startlingly modern. In German with English subtitles.