If you are rolling with Fassbinder, then it’s likely the camera is rolling on you too. So it is that Julianne Lorenz, film editor and now director of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder foundation, makes a small appearance, here wearing a dynamically weird pair of spectacles and playing a frosty jeweller, very well made up and got out, giving anything but customer satisfaction. Back in the church, the moment makes Lola cry, despite the storm clouds brewing and the fact that Von Bohm has reverted out of his inappropriate hiking suit and into something more traditional.  And down in the town, Julianne Lorenz plays the gatekeeper to a certain type of happiness that Von Bohm has imagined incorrectly.

I wonder what that must have been like, being placed before the camera like that?  There are so many actors in Fassbinder films that had never acted before, and many like Armin Meier and El Hedi ben Salem who had experienced nothing but the most menial labour before they became film stars.  Julianne Lorenz of course copes very well, but its testament to both her and Fassbinder that her character is different from herself; I’ve seen her in many interviews over the years and she is nothing like this!

The jewellery store is a humiliation for Lola and Schuckert, as could have been predicted by the look on Julianne Lorenz’s face when the camera opens on her — stern, funny and most unwelcoming.  It was her third appearance in a Fassbinder film, so she must have been getting used to it, but as one of the core crew members, it wouldn’t be a proper show without her.