DER FAN – Some people like yoghurt. Some others like quince. Simone likes 'R', and she eats him too. 'Der Fan' chronicles the obsessive star lust of a teenage German girl. Her life is is a litany of dull TV nights before she hits the autobahn and makes his (R's) scene. Collapses in his arms, shags him, then, in the true manner of the terminally attached, kills and eats him when he has to 'go away'. I admire this girl's aloofness. She's magnetic, despite evincing not one emotion beyond starstruck yearning or disdainful dismissal. I wonder why she falls for a Gary Numan clone, though. Gary Numan. I once sat reading a Patricia Highsmith novel outside a pub where he was lunching with his gig mates. He sounded really boring, droning on about his tedious suburban existence. I guess that's all part of it. Anyway, 'Der Fan' is great, an icy trawl through a culture fixated on its masters ie ours. Semi-art / semi exploitation, 'Der Fan' gets to pose as an interrogation of what it means to be beholden to social power AND blow its wad on a climax of sex and violence (and apostolic head shaving). See it. They make Germany look like Leeds. By the way, if you're the star-besotted type, you could do worse than check out Judy and Fred Vermorel's book 'StarLust', which is a crazed compendium of cranky fan mail detailing the wonky dream life of celebrity infected youth (the one I remember most is some poor waif's intricately detailed fantasy of nursing a terminally ill John Peel.)
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