In a Year of 13 Moons
d. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978
In a Year of 13 Moons may just be Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most emotional film. To anyone who has seen any of his work, this is saying a lot. It certainly is one of his most personal; at age 33, he wrote, directed, produced, photographed, and edited this wonderful film.
Erwin (an amazing Volker Spengler) is at the center of the film. By the time the movie begins, he is known as Elvira, for he has undergone a sex change as a rather compulsive action. We see him beaten by male prostitutes when he tries to hire one, "he says he's a woman," one of them says. Erwin/Elvira walks back home to discover that his boyfriend, Christoph, is leaving him.
As he stands in his empty apartment, the loneliness is so overwhelming that from that point on we care deeply for this character, and, we can assume, so does Fassbinder. In a Year of 13 Moons plays like an amazing collection of set pieces that, when looked at from a distance, make up the story of Erwin's life. This is what he himself is trying to do, and by the last reel of the film (one of the most heartbreaking ever filmed), he has come to terms with his life.
Through monologues, reapperances, searches, and many other devices, we learn that Erwin has a daughter, that he had a sex change due to a rich businessman named Anton Saitz, and that Erwin no longer knows where he fits on. After tracking down Saitz and finding that he has no answers for him, Erwin puts on a suit and goes to visit his daughter and her mother. They are having lunch and he comments on how happy it would make him to live with them; but both of them now know that it is much too late. In an act of final desparation, Erwin finds the man who interviewed him for a magazine article to try to talk to him again.
The end of In a Year of 13 Moons is inevitable, but that makes it no less heartbreaking. We see the people Erwin has encountered throughout the film coming to his apartment to find that he has killed himself, meanwhile the revealing tape of his interview plays in the background.
In a Year of 13 Moons is many things: an examination of sexual identity, a poignant portrayal of loneliness and desperation, further proof that Fassbinder is a genius, and also, and perhaps most importantly, personal filmmaking at its finest.
