My Need to Possess You Has Consumed My Soul: On Eckhart Schmidt’s 1982 Der Fan

 DER FAN / The Fan (aka Trance)

(Eckhart Schmidt, Germany, 1982, 92 minutes) 

My need to possess you has consumed my soul 

My life is trembling, I have no control 

–Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight, "Obsession" (1983) 

There's nothing more terrifying than a teenage girl. 

Granted, teenage girls have been mooning over pop stars for decades, but the late German filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt took that basic idea and ran with it all the fucking way. His 1982 psychological thriller has now been restored in 4K and premieres in the US at New York's Metrograph on Friday.

Simone (17-year-old Luxembourg actress Désirée Nosbusch, who looks like '80s Diane Lane from some angles and '70s Jenny Agutter from others), a high school student, is crazy about new wave musician R (Rheingold singer Bodo Staiger, whose Düsseldorf band also performed the score), a mononym like Robin Scott, who recorded as M when he released 1979's "Pop Muzik."

Right: Lothar Manteuffel, Bodo Staiger, and Brigitte Kunze 

of Rheingold

Schmidt presents Der Fan, his third film, from Simone's point of view as the mostly-silent superfan gives voice(over) to her every thought. It isn't just about loving R's chilly, synth-based music, which she listens to incessantly, but about loving the gentle, caring man who rules her fantasies, so she writes him letter after letter, undeterred by the fact that he never writes back--after all, plenty of other girls do the same--but she's certain he loves her; he just doesn't know it yet. (Rheingold's quintessentially Germanic music splices Kraftwerk with Bowie in Berlin.) 

Compared to R, everything else falls away: school, parents, even food (every time Simone sits down to eat she's interrupted). The teen crush is a universal phenomenon, except Simone doesn't even share her obsession with friends, because she doesn't have any. She's a pretty young woman with adorably crooked teeth and an enviable wardrobe from a middle class, two-parent household, but she has little going for her personality-wise. 

She even gets aggressive with the postman (Klaus Münster)--the closest thing she has to a friend--after weeks without a letter from R. She goes so far as to accuse the other postal workers of also keeping them from her. 

Because of her looks, her leather pants, and her propensity to wander around Ulm unaccompanied, men of various ages try to pick her up, and she seems distinctly uncomfortable with the attention. Eckhart suggests she isn't interested in real men at all, just the fantasy version who lives in her head. 

She confirms her lack of interest in reality when she throws her books away after daydreaming through her classes. After her dad threatens to send her to boarding school, she packs a bag and runs off to Munich, where she has more uncomfortable encounters with inferior men on her way to meet the superior R, who will surely sweep her off her feet. And he kind of does. 

Simone waits outside a television studio where she knows he'll be taping an episode of "Top Pop," and one day he magically appears, but instead of asking for an autograph, like all the other female fans, she stares and stares…and faints. When she comes to, with R looking over her, she's in the studio, where he invites her to sit in the stands while he prepares. It's 40 minutes into the picture, and she finally says more than a few words when he comes over for a friendly chat before the performance while his assistant and sometime (or wannabe) girlfriend stares daggers at the two of them. 

R follows up with a little private time in the green room where they share a kiss. More significantly, he leaves the studio after the taping with her and not the dagger-staring blonde. It's probably happened many times before, but Simone doesn't care; she's convinced she's the only one who counts. 

Instead of his hotel, R takes her to the modernist home of an associate who's away in the US. This seems risky in the pre-cellphone era, not least when one of these people is more than a little sexually inexperienced.

Once they cross the threshold, Eckhart also slips into a more arty mode in terms of the staging, lighting, and camera work. It isn't psychedelic necessarily, but everything seems off-kilter. Clothes come off and the usual things happen, but this isn't The Wall. Simone is a teenager, yes, but R isn't aggressive, though the Rheingold score has an eerie, The Hunger vibe to it. 

Simone was expecting a night of passion, except things end just as they were beginning to heat up as R suddenly announces that he needs to get back to his team to smooth things over, since he had left in a bit of a huff when they started to make demands he didn't feel like dealing with at the moment. 

So, he gets dressed and prepares to leave while Simone remains undressed. He gives her the key and swears he'll be back, but he doesn't clock how agitated she's becoming as he appears to move ever so slowly towards the door. Then, she screams. And screams again, and makes her move. Suffice to say, now he's well and truly hers, because he isn't going anywhere. Ever. 

What happens next plays out in darkness after Simone hears voices outside and turns off the light to evade detection. Tears roll down her face as she does what she does; you can make of that what you will. If you've read anything about the film, you'll have some idea what's in store, but I won't spoil the surprise, other than to say that Eckhart relies more on suggestion than special effects. Simone may be a poor student, but she's a clever girl. 

In Keir-La Janisse's essential guide to cinematic women on the edge, House of Psychotic Women, she describes Der Fan as "more art film than exploitation film," and she's spot on, even as other writers have described it as Euroshock or various shades of horror. They're not completely wrong, but it does have a certain icy elegance that takes it into a different register.

Though Bodo Staiger never acted in another feature, he's convincing as a narcissist who sees the comely admirer as willing, yet fails to really see her or hear what she's saying. It may be a problem she's struggled with her whole life: no one ever really saw or heard her, so she turned inward and stayed there. When she's with her parents, for instance, they only seem concerned that she attends school, eats her dinner, and that's about it. 

With R, Simone drops hints that she isn't just another fan, but he misses them, maybe wilfully. If he isn't as cold or as cruel as I expected, he's still an experienced adult man taking advantage of a vulnerable young woman. 

The same could be said of Eckhart Schmidt, since Désirée Nosbusch spends an entire extended sequence in the altogether. 

A known quantity in Germany at the time, she went to court to get the uncut version suppressed, but the filmmaker prevailed, leading to a falling out, though Eckhart got his, in a manner of speaking, since the film has suffered every imaginable indignity over the years, though the various adulterated versions have also helped to make it a curiosity, a collectible, and a cult classic. 

Years later, Nosbusch and Eckhart would reconcile, but I can see why it was a difficult shoot and why she had regrets, and yet I can't imagine anyone else in the role. Simone is so closed-off to everyone except the man who lives in her head that she could have been off-putting, but she's magnetic. 

After Der Fan, she continued to act for another five decades. Unlike Eckhart and Staiger, she's still with us (still exceptionally attractive, too). I hope she's made her peace with the film, because it's one in which a casually predatory man won't go on, because he can't go on, and a very hungry young lady will finally sit down at an elegant table to enjoy a hearty meal.

Der Fan was previously available on home video through Mondo Macabro, but the new Fun City Editions release marks the US theatrical debut. It's the star attraction in Metrograph's series That Most Taboo of Red Meats featuring House, In My Skin, Jennifer's Body, Raw, and Spider Baby. No Seattle dates yet, but if you're up for a road trip, Der Fan plays Portland's Hollywood Theatre on Sept 20. Images from the IMDb (Désirée Nosbusch, Nosbusch with Klaus Münster, and Simone Brahmann staring daggers), Spotify (Rheingold portrait), and Mondo Digital (Nosbusch with Bodo Staiger).  

A Journey into a Mysterious Past with Carla Simón's Semiautobiographical Romería

ROMERIA / Pilgrimage 

(Carla Simón, Spain, 2025, 111 minutes) 

With a pack on her back and a camcorder at the ready, 18-year-old Marina (newcomer Llúcia Garcia, who recalls Léa Seydoux) sets out in 2004 to track down her biological father's death certificate in order to apply for a scholarship to study film in Barcelona. And to solve the mystery of his relatively short life. 

Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón (Summer 1993, Alcarràs) uses Marina's mother's diary entries, which cover a crucial four-year period, as an organizing principle, augmented by Marina's video images (32-year-old Catalan-Valencian actress Laia Manzanares reads the entries in voiceover). 

Things get off to an awkward start when Marina visits the civil registry in Vigo and finds no record of her birth (her mother also died when she was young, but earlier). A clerk tells her they can correct the record with a sworn affidavit from her grandparents, so she goes on a sailing trip with her cousin Lois (Sex and Lucia's Tristán Ulloa, below), his wife, and their sons. Their final destination: her grandparents' home. On the phone, she tells her adoptive mother these people seem rich, though she isn't after money.

On land, she connects with aunts and an uncle. Though they're welcoming, she tells her mother she finds them odd, possibly because there's something they aren't telling her, like why her grandparents (Marina Troncoso and José Ángel Egido from Mondays in the Sun) warned her adoptive parents to stay away. A younger cousin also says they were told not to touch her, most likely because her father died from AIDS, though that's not how HIV+ transmission works. 

As Marina learns more about her parents, she finds that a lot of it isn't good, but also that his family only made her father Alfonso's final years harder. 

Aside from a few revelations, she mostly meets with evasions, especially from her grandparents. She finds an ally, however, in her cousin Nuno (fellow newcomer Mitch Martin, here billed simply as Mitch), though their physical chemistry isn't exactly ideal since they're, you know, cousins, but their relationship is convivial, conspiratorial, and thoroughly Platonic. 

Then she meets a scruffy street cat, who leads her down a dark street and away from a bustling bar, at which point she steps into an entirely different realm. Considering the realism of the rest of the film, this extended sequence which takes place in the mid-1980s, isn't unwelcome, though it moves things in an entirely different direction, one filled with sex, drugs, full frontal nudity, and ghostly choreography as the diary entries Marina has been reading come to vivid, feverish life. 

Simón, in her second semiautobiographical feature, returns to the real world at the end, and La Chimera DP Hélène Louvart handles both modes with ease. Marina sets out to find a document and to solve a mystery, but she also forces her family, as much through her resemblance to her mother as to her actions, to confront their past--and gets in a little harmless revenge, too--though I didn't realize until I looked up the credits that the diary entries aren't fictionalized, but come from letters written by Simón's mother, Neus. 

Romería follows 2017's Summer 1993 in which Simón revisits the period in her childhood just after she lost her parents and as she adjusts to her new adoptive home. (I haven't yet seen 2022's Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs, which explores her Catalan heritage, but I plan to watch it next.) 

Simón could have become a novelist, or even a therapist, as a way of dealing with her past, but she became a filmmaker, just as Marina plans to do. Fortunately, neither film is solipsistic or self-pitying, not least when the stigma around AIDS persists, though not to the same degree as in the 1980s, during Spain's La Movida Madrileña, which gave rise to an increase in intravenous drug use and HIV+ infection.

I was particularly impressed by the naturalistic performance of Llúcia Garcia, who Simón's crew plucked from obscurity as she was returning from summer camp. She handles two roles with grace and seems comfortable with nudity and semi-nudity, since there's a lot of both. It's hard to believe Romería represents her first professional credit. I hope it won't be her last. 

For all the time spent with biological family in the film, though, a significant subtext lies mostly behind the scenes, since Simón's adoptive brother composed the score, her adoptive sister appears in her films, and her adoptive parents read her screenplays and watch the edits. If Marina appears uncomfortable around her blood relatives, the making of Romería, in addition to Simón's previous films, honors the loving adoptive families who help to make the dreams of one-time orphans come true.

Romería plays SIFF Film Center through Sunday, Aug 23. Images from Janus Films via The New Yorker (Llúcia Garcia), the IMDb (Garcia with Tristán Ulloa), The Moveable Fest (Garcia with Mitch Martin), and Variety (Credit: Quim Vives; Garcia with Ulloa and Marina Troncoso).

Advance to Paradise with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Murder Mystery The Samurai and the Prisoner

THE SAMURAI AND THE PRISONER / Kokurôjô / 

黒牢城, 

(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2026, Japan, 147 minutes) 

True to its title, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner is a jidaigeki, or period drama, adapted from Honobu Yonezawa's 2021 novel Kokurôjô, with a warrior and a captive, but it's also an eastern proto-western and a murder mystery with all the trimmings. 

In 16th century Japan, specifically during the Sengoku period, there will be mysteries aplenty and circumstances will make a detective out of Araki Murashige (Departures' Masahiro Motoki), lord of Settsu and enemy of brutal warlord Oda Nobunaga (Shingo Bandô), who aims to overtake Arioka Castle. Though merciful, Murashige will do what it takes to protect his holdings. 

When Kuroda Kanbei (Cloud's Masaki Suda), a clever Nobunaga envoy and a member of the rival Harima clan, tries to persuade him to surrender by insisting he can't win, Murashige imprisons him, and when Abe Jūemon switches loyalties from Murashige to Nobunaga, his 11-year-old son Jinen asks to be killed, just as Kanbei had done. Murashige refuses, despite his wife's entreaties, but the boy ends up dead anyway. According to the bushidō code, it's less shameful to be killed than to be imprisoned. 

Murashige suspects foul play, and sets out to determine the culprit by interviewing suspects, many of whom mention that Koori Juemon (Bright Future's Joe Odagiri) was wielding a longbow that night, though he swears it was to protect the castle from invaders. With no other leads, Murashige takes an unorthodox step by asking Kanbei, the prisoner, to help him solve the mystery. With his help, he does, but the film isn't over as the battle for Arioka Castle continues. 

Though merciful (and possibly infertile), Murashige is hardly a pacifist, and when he feels it's time to attack Nobunaga's forces, he leads the charge, and his men successfully beat them back. In the melée, though he loses a favored warrior, and vows to keep an eye on his son. Considering Jinen's death combined with his wife's sorrow over their childlessness, I expected the boy to play a larger role, but Murashige never mentions him again. 

The battle itself, though, produces another mystery regarding the death of Nobunaga commander Ōtsu Nagamasa and the role of two clans under Murashige's leadership, so he questions the Christian Takayama Dario (Ikkei Watanabe) and the Buddhist Saika Magoroku (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), just as he questioned the suspects in Jinen's murder, but the case remains unsolved until he seeks Kanbei's counsel, and once again, the prisoner delivers. 

As the seasons change from winter to spring to summer to fall, there are more murders and further mysteries involving theft and arson, and Kanbei helps him to solve each one. Murashige offers to release him if he renounces his allegiance to Nobunaga and joins his war council. After all, that's what Murashige once did, and the prisoner has earned his respect. Kanbei agrees, but that doesn't mean he's trustworthy, not least when he says he's more interested in serving the man, whom he also respects, than the mission, which he believes is lost. Murashige also has his men to consider, since they're unlikely to accept a Harima member as a colleague. It's a conundrum with no easy answers. 

Like a Watson to his Holmes, Kanbei points him in the right direction, but Murashige comes to find, on his own, that all these mysterious deaths are connected. His mercy was seen as a vulnerability and an impediment to Settsu's survival, so an associate took matters into their own hands, but no one could see the long game Murashige was playing quite like Kanbei. 

If there's a lesson here, and I believe there are a few, it's that listening can be a leader's greatest asset. I won't say whether Kanbei proves trustworthy or not, but Murashige takes him as seriously as his closest advisors, and learns more from him than anyone else. If they don't exactly ride off into the sunset at the end, Murashige is better off for knowing--and saving--him.  

I haven't seen all of Kurosawa's feature films, but I've seen a baker's dozen, and The Samurai and the Prisoner marks his first jidaigeki. He does the genre proud on every level, particularly the cinematography from Cloud's Yasuyuki Sasaki who works wonders with light and shadow, though it isn't his first historical effort, since the Ryūsuke Hamaguchi co-written Wife of a Spy, one of his few films to center on a female character, took place during World War II. 

That said, it took me a while to ease into the richly-detailed world Kurosawa creates, because there are so many characters, and their relationships to each other are as vital as they are complicated, but the more I watched, the more it all made sense. The director's films aren't usually this densely populated, though the way this one boils down to the tension between two worthy opponents isn't especially unusual, and also powers previous films, like 1997 J-horror classic Cure, which took inspiration from the Starling vs. Lecter relationship in Jonathan Demme-by-way-of Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs. That captor vs. captive dynamic continues here. 

Kurasawa has always been terrific at casting, and he's really upped the ante this time around, because every actor rises to the occasion, including Yuriko Yoshitaka, the sole woman, as Murashige's wife, Chiyoho, a Siege of Nagashima survivor who doesn't understand her husband's reticence to kill even as she's haunted by the blood-soaked, Nobunaga-fueled nightmares of her childhood.  

Another notable performer, Yamato Kochi--a man with such a serious countenance that he tends to look a little loony when he smiles--who plays the crucial role of Settsu warrior Itami Ichirozaemon, may be most familiar to non-Japanese viewers, because he played "the walking man" in Genki Kawamura's Neon horror hit Exit 8, but Masahiro Motoki as Murashige makes the most significant impression as an idiosyncratic leader who doesn't owe his beliefs, in the film, to Christian or Buddhist teachings, but simply to the idea that there's nothing weak or unmanly about mercy, about knowing when to walk away, and about knowing how to make the perfect pot of tea.

 

The Samurai and the Prisoner plays SIFF Cinema Uptown through Thurs, Aug 20. Images from The Japan Times (Masaki Suda and Masahiro Motoki) and the IMDb (Motoki and Joe Odagiri and the defenders of Arioka Castle).  

Original Maverick: James Garner, 1928-2014

Here's the pre-obituary I wrote for Amazon's now-defunct blog Armchair Commentary in 2009. Garner would end up outliving this piece by five years. 

"What was I qualified to do to make a living? Nothing. You don't need qualifications as an actor or a politician. And I didn't want to be a politician."--James Garner

 

Emmy Award-winning actor James Garner (born James Bumgarner) died on July 19, 2014 at the age of 86. 

Star of screens both big and small, the tall, dark, and handsome Westerner made his biggest mark as the title character in popular programs Maverick on ABC in the 1950s and '60s and The Rockford Files on NBC in the '70s (followed by eight made-for-TV movies on CBS in the '90s).

 

Maverick slideshow with Bret (Garner) and his brother, Bart (Jack Kelly) 

Born in Denver, Oklahoma, Garner served in the Merchant Marine, the National Guard, and the U.S. Army, receiving two Purple Hearts for injuries sustained in the Korean War. Despite his all-American good looks, Garner continued to struggle with serious health problems in the ensuing decades, culminating in quintuple bypass and knee-replacement surgery.

After his service career ended, Garner moved from the stage to advertising work to guest spots and would continue to act in commercials, most famously for Polaroid. While The Rockford Files, in which he played exonerated ex-con-turned-private eye Jim Rockford, cemented Garner's star status, the Emmy Award-winning show also served as a training ground for writer David Chase, who went on to create The Sopranos, and actor Tom Selleck, who followed in Garner's primetime footsteps as Magnum P.I.

 

Trailer for The Great Escape (1963) 

During his career, Garner also earned an Oscar nomination for Murphy's Romance with Sally Field and appeared in Up Periscope, The Children's Hour with Shirley MacLaine, The Great Escape with Steve McQueen, The Americanization of Emily with frequent co-star Julie Andrews, Support Your Local Sheriff!, John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix, which kindled a lifelong enthusiasm for racing, HBO's Barbarians at the Gate, and Victor/Victoria (below), directed by Andrews' husband, Blake Edwards.

One of Garner's last hits was Nick Cassavetes' 2004 The Notebook, in which he played Ryan Gosling's character as a senior citizen. It was a stretch, but Garner made it work. In 2009, House creator David Shore announced that he would be adapting The Rockford Files for a new generation, though it's hard to imagine anyone who could possibly fill James Garner's shoes. (The Rockford Files with David Boreanaz will premiere on NBC in Fall 2026.)

While promoting Clint Eastwood's 2000 Space Cowboys, in which he re-teamed with the Maverick guest star, he told the BBC, "When I go, I want to finish the last shot of a picture and go directly off the set, like Spencer Tracy." 

At the time of his death, James Garner was survived by Lois Clarke, his wife of 58 years, and daughters Kimberly and Gigi (Clarke died in 2021 at 98).

James Garner joins previous obituaries for Peter Falk, Sidney Poitier, and Norman Jewison. Images from The New York Times (Garner, circa The Rockford Files, DPA/Picture-Alliance via Associated Press) and Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Garner and Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria).