In a Year of 13 Moons


In a Year of 13 Moons is a 1978 West German drama film written, produced and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It stars Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Eva Mattes and Günther Kaufmann.
The film was made three months after the suicide of Fassbinder's lover at the time, Armin Meier. There are some real life details from Meier's life that are incorporated into Elvira's character.

Plot

The story takes place in a year with 13 moons, with the following title card shown at the beginning of the movie:
Elvira Weishaupt was a butcher named Erwin, who was happily married, and loved his wife and daughter. Then one day Erwin met
Anton Saitz and fell in love with him, but Anton nonchalantly said he would only be interested if Erwin were a woman. Erwin took the statement literally, and gave up his entire life, work and family, and had a sex change operation, becoming Elvira.
But she soon finds out that Anton has moved on and abandoned her, and now she revisits her past life in order to make sense of her new identity, in an effort to put her life back together. In the end, she commits suicide.

Cast

Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a score of 76%, based on 17 film critic's reviews. Film critic Jay Scott said "the movie is a relentlessly uncompromising, keening cri de coeur, a movie that has turned a wake into a work of art." He went on to say that "never before has the intense, depressive, claustrophobic interior world of the potential suicide been brought to the screen with such force."
Film critic Vincent Canby wrote it is "not a film to recommend to anyone who isn't familiar with other work by this director; without adequate preparation, the uninitiated movie patron might think he was having a nightmare about a nightmare; the movie is grotesque, arbitrary, sentimental and cold as ice."
Richard Brody commented that "Fassbinder has Elvira revisit the stages of her life with raucous humor and hysterical melodrama, and Volker Spengler throws himself into the role with heartbreaking abandon." In her review for Film Comment, Violet Lucca observed the movie "is elegiac and complex, allowing a panoply of potential readings; it's the most elegant release of grief transfigured into film, embodying its indiscriminate effects."