Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant

Petra von Kant is Rainer Werner Fassbinder at his very best. Every single cut in this film looks absolutely gorgeous, the photography is stunning, and the actors look as if they haven't got a single feeling left to feel - except bitterness. It's also one of Fassbinder's most relentless and uncompromising dramas; the atmosphere of despair and loneliness is intense and effected me deeply, and the humor one finds in some of the director's other films is almost totally absent. Disney fans should probably think twice before viewing.

One reviewer described Bitter Tears as "a high camp lesbian slumber party", and that sort of sums it up, except that the blankets are like the dressing gown Medea made for Jason's wife - dipped in acid. Fassbinder adapted it from his own play and basically filmed a performance - there's only one set, Petra's apartment, and the characters come and go exactly as in the play, with one crucial difference in the last minute of the movie. All the usual suspects are here; Margit Carstensen has a ball as the Swansonesque Petra, Hanna Schygulla slinks and drawls as Petra's lover, Irm Hermann is at her beaky best as the watchful Marlene. It all culminates in the birthday party to end all birthday parties. A tough one to get into, but you'll never see anything like it anywhere else.

This is a typical Fassbinder movie: very strong psychological characterisation of the main characters, lot of talking, nearly no action. All the scenes of the film are located in the bedroom of Petra von Kant, a rich fashion designer. In that bedroom people are discussing life, love, ambition, frustration, despair and so on. So, a lot of talking although one of the most important characters does not say one word. It takes some effort of the spectator to follow the film but it is quite an interesting film. You should be glad if you see one such a film a month.

The archetypal mid-period Fassbinder film of the kind so lovingly pastiched/parodied in Francois Ozon's 'Water Falling on Burning Rocks'. Like much of his early work, the film is based on his own play, which 'limitation' Fassbinder compounds by refusing to open it out - imprisonment and immobility being central Fassbinder themes, as well as providing the metaphors that theatre provokes - role-playing, dual/multiple identities, staging.

The film is like a prison drama - its four acts never leave Petra's preposterously ornate bedroom, filled with dolls, mannequins (she is a fashion designer), and the kind of obtrusive decor that allows Fassbinder to compose intricate multiple-frame tableaux - and neither does Petra. In the 'real' world of the film, she is a jet-setter, attending celebrity shows, photo-shoots, but in the film world, she is paralysed, stuck not only in this bedroom, but in a circumscribed series of poses and movements, not to mention stock phrases and attitudes.

if she makes any progress at all, it is a negative one, as she declines from empty rhetoric about freedom to a horrified admission of her own self-entrapment, appropriately visualised in the bars of her bed-frame, and the mirror that reflects her back on herself, consumes her, like Narcissus, sucked into her own self-love, her gestures at role-play doomed attempts at consolidating her own egotistical power.

What's worse, other characters seem as imprisoned as her, but they can come and go, even if they are doomed to return, condemned to the same relations with Petra, even if power-relations shift. Only one character seems to break free - Karin - and that is by using, humiliating and ditching Petra. Like 'All about my mother', 'Bitter Tears' is a loose remake of 'All About Eve' - Petra is even paying alimony to a certain 'Joseph Mankiewicz'. Karin is the rising star who submits herself to an elder mentor for as long as it suits before dumping her when she has taken what she needs. Of course, Fassbinder elides any Hollywood melodrama inherent in such a set-up: each 'act' involves a large time gap, so that Karin's turning nasty seems disturbingly abrupt.

Stylistically, the film's closed world is matched by the restricted camera movements and murky colours. Fassbinder constantly distances us from the melodrama, by compositions at once comic and mocking - the tears of two women being framed by mannequins etc. In one brilliant scene, Petra talks to Sidonie while looking into her hand mirror so that she appears to be talking to herself, both Sidonie and her 'reflection' interrogating her.

The women's bodies are undermined not only by unflattering framing, but by the fetishistic, limbless plastic figures surrounding them. Most incongruous of all is the large wall size painting that forms a background to the film, a large classical subject with abandoned child, prone woman and upright man, continually ironising, mocking, undermining the narrative, even provoking it, as characters pose in a similar fashion. There is one crucial difference - the man - the crucial absence from this male-mediated female psychodrama.

Well, one of two. Another is the speech of Petra's long-suffering servant Marlene, who may, or may not, be the real creative force behind Petra's success, who exists in a Beckett-like relationship with her mistress as the latter, like Hamm in 'Endgame', winds down towards inertia. Like the audience, she is mute, and observing. She is also the one sympathetic character, her isolation and anguish eloquently expressed in some very moving composions as she stands behind screens, unable to say no.

The most ironic aspect of this film is that although directed by a gay director and depicting a woman tormented by frustrated Sapphic passion is that it is actually based on a heterosexual relationship, sort of.

Fassbinder was in fact bisexual and treated the women in his life extremely differently, notably two actresses who both feature in the film: Eva Mattes, to whom he was invariably a model of quiet consideration, and Irm Hermann, who he treated cruelly, invariably giving her the worst parts in his films, perfectly demonstrated by the wordless role of Margit Carstenson's maid who spends the whole proceedings silently looking on with the air of one who has seen it all before.