Rio das Mortes

1971 [GERMAN]

Action / Comedy

1
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 35% · 3 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 35% · 100 ratings
IMDb Rating 6.2/10 10 785 785

Plot summary

Michel and Guenther, working in dead-end jobs, are obsessed with going to Peru to find buried treasure, using a map of the Rio das Mortes. Michel's girlfriend, Hanna, humors their plan, but really just wants to get married.

Director

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Photo
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Top cast

Hanna Schygulla Photo
Hanna Schygulla as Hanna
Rudolf Waldemar Brem Photo
Rudolf Waldemar Brem as Kneipenbesucher
Kurt Raab Photo
Kurt Raab as Tankwart
Michael König Photo
Michael König as Michel
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
800.94 MB
970*720
German 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 27 min
Seeds ...
1.45 GB
1456*1080
German 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 27 min
Seeds 3

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by armagnac23

For Fassbinder completists

This is a good film which will appeal to the realist Fassbinder fans but does not in any way rank with his best gritty works (Merchant, Herr R., Ali)perhaps because of its unrealistic proceedings: The story develops somewhat slowly and predictably, and none of the characters have much development. The acting is good yet primitive, and definitely has an repertory feel to it--one of the beauties of RWF's movies: it was almost comforting to see Gunther Kaufmann, Hanna Schygulla, and Harry Baer together. Michael Konig also puts in a good role as Michel. I thought the best scenes of the movie are when Gunther and Michel seek financial assistance from Hanna's relative.
Reviewed by jaibo 7 / 10

Male mythic dreams, female alarms

After the heavy-handed Brechtian devices of a number of his early films, Fassbinder really begins to get going in this made-for-TV piece about a couple of working class men who share a boyhood dream to search for treasure in Rio das Mortes in Peru. The dream they share is a typical storytelling "call to adventure" and the film delineates their deadbeat and usually hopeless attempts to raise the money for the venture - their economic situation is too hopeless for them to save, selling their possessions and cashing in their inheritances doesn't add up to much and attempts to finance the trip as a business venture and a research expedition fail due to their hopeless inabilities. But luck arrives in the form of a widow with more money than sense, who stumps up the finance and so off they go. What we've seen of them doesn't inspire much hope for their adventure...All the while, their male story is ironically counterpointed with the hopes, dreams and aspirations of the live-in girlfriend of one of the men, played by the extraordinary Hanna Schygulla. She goes to college and takes part in a feminist theatre-piece (the conclusion of which is "women's own behaviour is the best evidence of their oppression") but learns little, as she dreams of placating her nagging mother by marrying and having lots of kids. All of that is made nonsense of by the dream-journey of the men, which she almost kiboshes by nearly shooting them at the end, a quirk of fate saving them.Fassbinder, to my mind for the first time successfully, moulds his early obsession with the homo-social exclusion of the female in male friendships into a contemporary melodrama of some verve and wit. His story, a classic "quest myth", is ironically set in a society seething with casual misogyny, violence, class contempt, economic want and ignorance. Gritty realism is used to undermine the high-falutin dreams of the men, but the film suggests that lucky twists of fate might save a dream - all Fassbinder leaves men with is faith in turns of a friendly card; all he leaves women with is incompatible hopes of settling down with their menfolk, who shaped the patriarchal world in which they're subservient to ideals to which men's inmost dreams are opposed.
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