"Root canal" seemed to put the perfect sardonic cap on this romantic misadventure. I regarded it purely as an alibi, and her as a "cheat," escaping her social obligation to have a drink with me (the prolongation of my erotic fantasy); though I now wonder if her teeth were not actually in pain, which would explain her puffy cheeks. In retrospect, I see that I had set myself up for disappointment: by bribing her with the ticket, I made it almost impossible to accept that she was interested in me, and I thrust her into the role of the heartless coquette who would leave me at the door of the saloon. I can hardly believe I was so naive as not to guess that her "roommate" was a man. Beautiful women rarely live alone. Perhaps I did have a premonition, but simply needed to play out the farce. When I met Emil, his rugged handsomeness clicked in my mind as the physically appropriate counterpart to the exquisite Gudrun. I was getting my comeuppance for thinking I could make off with this lovely starlet-type I had no business to covet. Back to your kennel.

Which shows how far we are willing to stretch reality to fit our need for rejection. The irony was that Gudrun was not a starlet, after all, but another struggling writer, eager for craft advice, who – far from dismissing me as a clumsy nerd – perhaps even looked up to me. Neither was she that clichéd "cold German" I had wanted her to be (as a frisson to my New York Jewish soul), but someone with a mountain of problems, who seemed trapped, baffled by life, going round and round in place. It was I who showed a measure of coldness by my inadequate, or uneven, sympathy. True, I had been touched by the frankness of her despair; yet, once I realized that my chances of sleeping with her were nil, I was happy to dismiss her as something between a misdirected opportunist and a loser. More precisely, I saw her as the prototype of an insecure glamorous woman who is utterly bored with her looks but has traded on them all her life, so that she doesn't know how to substitute patience and discipline for the shortcuts they have given her.

And yet, I had listened eagerly enough. My mother had trained me from childhood to listen to a woman's troubles. Gudrun remarked that she thought it odd to be telling so many personal things so shortly after meeting me, but to me it was perfectly natural: I had slipped into the Oedipal situation, complete with larger virile man in the background whom she complained did not understand her. I had become the "son" paralyzed between pressing his suit and loyally defending his father. In the end, I had listened to Gudrun with the same engrossment with which I might have watched one of Fassbinder's films about women in crisis, such as Fear of Fear, in which a gaunt, elegant blonde becomes increasingly isolated and anxious. Life is the continuation of film by other means.

As it happened, I was given a second chance to take her seriously as a human being, when – marring the perfection of the "root canal" vignette – Gudrun phoned me after her return from Las Vegas. She had greatly enjoyed our last conversation, she said, and called just to chat. She may also have been indirectly looking for a way out of her life with Emil, but this I will never know; I was not that encouraging and failed to arrange another meeting with her. It struck me at the time that she was lonely for a writing guru or a brotherly confidant, neither of which role I wanted to play with her. You see, I was in the market strictly for a lover.

And what about Fassbinder? Despair proved to be a turning point in my appreciation of him. Though I never reneged on my passion for his earlier movies, it was one of those films that jolted me out of a particular auteur worship. With Antonioni, the disenchantment had been Zabriskie Point, with Fellini, Juliet of the Spirits, with Kurosawa, Red Beard, with Truffaut, Stolen Kisses: these were works that exposed some smug, rancid, or intellectually shallow side of their maker's personality, to an extent that it was no longer possible for me to look forward to their future productions with uncritical faith.

After Despair, Fassbinder went on to make a few decent movies, like Lola and Veronika Voss, but for the most part, I felt, his juices had dried up. Berlin Alexanderplatz, that supposed summit of Fassbinderist art, actually seemed to me flat and indifferently realized, a TV mini-series directed by the yard. He appeared to have lost his way, partly thanks to drugs, by the time he died of an overdose. Of course, such hindsight can never be trusted: had he lived, he might well have gotten a second wind and turned out even riper, more mature masterpieces.

Indeed, I believe that the cinema has never properly recovered from the untimely deaths of its last two great visionaries, Fassbinder and Tarkovsky. Perhaps because we have never properly grieved them – allowed ourselves fully to feel the emptiness their passing left on the world's screens – we cinephiles stumble on, mumbling and complaining and hoping and exaggerating our enthusiasms, in the perplexing, splintered, and mostly numb terrain which is contemporary film.

"We have lost our greasy wild boar," Werner Herzog said after Fassbinder's death. Hearing his words, I felt a pang of loss myself; and I wished I had bothered to introduce myself to the leather-jacketed maestro that evening at the Goethe House.