Fassbinder’s Unrequited Love: In a Year with 13 Moons

In 1978 Fassbinder ended his relationship with Armin Meier, who then committed suicide. Fassbinder’s response was In a Year with 13 Moons, whose central character Elvira is repeatedly rejected, unloved, or simply de trop. An extraordinary response to Meier’s death, its ambivalent tribute is an intimate imagining of the experience of rejection. If there is remorse, it is not to be found in any leavening of the unlovable Elvira’s repellent qualities; the rejection is uncompromising. Uncompromising, too, however, is Elvira’s desire, which thereby takes on a terrible dignity; the depiction of abjection is reparative to the degree that it registers it—sees it and, admitting impotence to offer succor or consolation, registers it as the sufferer’s own. The film’s formal intricacies and abyssal references—to Tasso, Goethe, Beethoven, Mahler, and Schiller, among others—point to a self-accusation inextricable from an exorbitant aesthetic ambition, all within its tribute to unrelenting want.