Simone (Désirée Nosbusch) is a seventeen-year-old whose entire existence revolves around her favourite pop star, an electropop musician with a mysterious persona named simply R (Bodo Steiger). Her schoolwork suffers, she is uncommunicative towards her parents, and she doesn't feel like eating very much, all because of her devotion to her idol who she has begun to write letters to, convinced she will receive a reply as glowing as the missives she has sent to him. But no matter how much she hassles the postman, a reply never arrives, and she acts ever more irrationally, refusing to even attend school and fighting her father physically for the remote control when R is on the television...
The relationship between the artist and the aficionado can be a complex one, especially if the artist is much-admired, but it's safe to say not many fans would behave as Simone does in Der Fan, which was also known as Trance in English-speaking countries so as not to confuse it with the then-recent Lauren Bacall thriller, which to be fair had a not dissimilar premise, that of the follower turning rather too close to a psychopath for comfort in the presence of the person they placed on a pedestal. With that in mind, you might anticipate director Eckhart Schmidt's film to follow that stalker scenario, with the sympathies fully for the object of the adoration who now feels threatened, yet it did not play out that way as he had a different take on the subject.
Not that this was entirely free of clichés, but they were presented in such a way as to make this deliberately-paced drama come across as more of a science fiction movie, as if the audience was observing some curious form of life who did not conform to the ways of conventional society, so extreme were her reactions to what in most others' opinions were the result of raging hormones. As the antiheroine, Nosbuch really was the same age as her character, which led to controversy when the film unexpectedly caught on in its native West Germany given what Simone got up to in the last act, and maybe more pertinently her state of undress - you can't imagine many films these days bringing an actress of those years to those scenes.
Luxembourger Nosbusch was a veteran of showbiz by this point, incidentally, which may have convinced her she could handle such a difficult interpretation, though she had second thoughts when photos of her nude performance escaped into the media, as she was already a celebrity in Western Europe. Meanwhile, back at the plot, R was revealed as something of a love 'em and leave 'em sort who would pluck a visiting fan looking for an autograph from the crowd, give them a little extra special treatment like inviting them in to a TV show recording, then spirit them away for an evening of passionate lovemaking (or as passionate as he can muster, at any rate), basically exploiting impressionable girls much in the way the record companies exploit their savings.
Only there isn't much love here, not from R anyway, a problem the film seeks to redress as Simone has if anything too much love, and when she hitchhikes to Munich from her hometown, negotiating Good Samaritans and perverts alike, she is practically unable to speak to him when he pays her attention. According to Schmidt, this was a commentary on how the Nazis were welcomed to power, and there were visual references to those dark days throughout, though for more viewers it would be a tale of a fan who gives a callous pop star their just desserts. Even so, you could argue he was overserved in light of what happens, which had this been made thirty years later would have been some bad tempered torture porn session, but in this case was more original, though no less offputting. Steiger was an actual musician and his band were responsible for the electronic soundtrack, which might explain why his fictional position as idol to countless teenage girls is a tad hard to believe, but it was how this developed by making a virtue of one fan's vengeance, tempered with that twisted love.
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