More than any other of Fassbinder's early films noirs, Gods of the Plague is primarily a mood piece, its narrative impressionistically sketched and expressionistically recorded. Each scene achieves a near-absolute existential immediacy, and the causal connections between them, only thinly suggested (expository dialogue, even more than the film's other conversations, is minimal and monosyllabic), remain the subject of speculative reconstruction rather than of any self-evident logic. The relationships between the characters themselves similarly elude definition, projection, retrospection and permanence…. Though the country-outing sequence, with its freewheeling aerial shots of the car moving down empty lanes, and the absurd reunion punch-up which leaves the underworld underdogs piled up, winded and semi-conscious, on top of one another, recalls the nouvelle vague and some of the ephemeral joy of Godard's bande à part, the charm of Fassbinder's petty criminals is considerably less evident, largely because, despite certain marked moral delineations …, he deliberately...