Bloody philistines If throughout the CIS the most famous maniac, even from a purely cultural point of view, is still the Rostov Ripper Andrei Romanych, in the States - connoisseur of couture dresses made of human skin Ed Gein, then in the United Germany the main cause of childhood enuresis and nightmares of prenatal burghers since the 20s of the last century was a lover of non-traditional boys Fritz Harmann, whose deeds were awarded a cinematic embodiment three times, and the story of this serial killer, thanks to the language of cinema, from an exclusively criminal and pathological, became a certain generalizing process at the German social and political stages. First in the “M” of 1931, Fritz Lang constructed a parable of fear, one of the heralds of the coming triumph of fascism, then in 1995 the documentary filmmaker Romuald Carmacar in his “Master of Death/Murderer” presented a postmodern view of Harmann with his own eyes, along the way verbalizing the tendency to some tolerant humanization of someone who did not quite deserve it, and in the gap between these opposite in spirit and letter of the movie tapes stuck the second full-length work of Ully Lomelov’s 1973 wolf.
Before Ully Lomell became known as the worst director in the horror genre, surpassing compatriot Uwe Ball, but unable to reach the stars of Ed Wood, Jr., Herr Lomell was one of the participants in the cult Andy Warhol Factory, debuted as an actor with the racial American explofeminist Russ Meyer, and in the end was part of the famous creative family and simply a family with many members of the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who had already managed to get a full-fledged collaboration with him in the film. However, in the case of this tape, it is very difficult to determine, in fact, the degree of direct directorial contribution of Lomelle to the authenticity of the picture, in which there is too much copyistically Fassbinder than Lomellevsky himself; the student turned out to be quite capable in general, but his teacher did not outperform him, because “The Tenderness of Wolves” purely staged drowns in an intolerable secondary, which is not surprising, because the soundtrack filled with typical for Fassbinder’s painful mourning of social insanity, was answered by none other than Perbenkov, as the wolf, then the main participants of the film “Farrebinov” in Kos, who regularly appeared in the film “Jurgrebirga” in the film “Jurgov, in the film “Juergia” before the cameraman”. As such, the original directorial methodology of Ulli Lomella is not observed: in the picture more reigns chthonic statics of Fassbinder and pathological melancholy of Raab.
Like “Why did Mr. R?,” “The Tenderness of the Wolves” is not a story about the very fact of the ongoing violence, but an attempt to understand its root cause, exploring in essence the problems of philistine existence, very dull and reflective. Ambivalent in nature, this jellying everyday cruelty film with documentary meticulousness recreates the process of the terrifying convergence of the average man with his heap of small and large troubles and the Maniac, who went far beyond ordinary existence. The malleability of the victims to the influence of Harmann-Raab, the undisclosed easily he deprives them of life, says only one thing, but this is the main core of the entire Lomella ribbon: social apathy, petty-bourgeois anemia of the conditional 20s, when Germany was in a state of general crisis: morals, politics, economy - paradoxically begins to project on the 50-70s, when the "new economic miracle" of Germany took place, but satiety could not remove from the philistine space of the notorious indifference. Moreover, Lommel is not inclined to feel any intelligible pity for the very real victims of Fritz Harmann, since their inner world hardly interests him. Harmann gradually acquires emblems, he is not yet a hero, but no longer an antihero. Rather, an integral part of that world, where true hatred of all living things and of oneself is reconciled in a slow dance macabre with the power of invariable daily human rituals, death – cruel, tormenting, devoid of its salvific essence – becomes something so familiar to Harmann and everyone around that even no sacred horror is hidden. Philistineism, according to Lomel, produces not only monsters and their victims; philistineism is devoid of any signs of diseases of conscience, because no matter what is done nearby, representatives of this social category essentially do not care. And they can make excuses for anyone, but for themselves in particular. It, this philistine in blood, punishes itself in this way, because Harmann’s suffocating room, where the process of seduction and death takes place, only at first glance seems closed to unnecessary eyes. The local nightmare is present outside, and sometimes it simply changes places with each other; the fear becomes palpable on a physiological level, and it cannot be eliminated, since the tape does not give anything concrete to the finale - only a taste of the completeness of the path of the main antagonist. There will be no definitive answer as to why Mr. F was mad. It is impossible to rationally comprehend the irrational; what remains is only close to a necrorealistic aesthetic, not devoid of irony, the fixation of the slow sleep of the mind not only of Fritz Harmann and his faceless victims, but also of the society outside his room of fear.