Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant

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.

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 one-apartment setting for this film creates a very appropriate sense of claustrophobia and confinement. Fassbinder and actress Margin Carstensen masterfully detail the progression of Petra's deterioration. The schematic framework of this film is not apparent at first; nothing initially indicates Petra's vulnerability and neuroses which makes her ultimate psychic annihilation more poignant. Fassbinder's view of human relationships was egocentric and borders on the cynical---however his work resonates because the approach is so unsentimental and Carstensen is unafraid to make the character unsympathetic, even pathetic as she pines for the return of an absent lover (Schygulla) in the devastating latter half of the film.

The production design and cinematography (by the great Michael Ballhaus-"Bram Stoker's Dracula") are magnificent in that instead of creating great vistas or otherworldly visions, they remain firmly entrenched in a context of confinement and claustrophobia. The artifice (note the outlandish outfits!!!) and overhyped hothouse atmosphere of the film contribute to a feeling of imprisonment; Petra is trapped by her loneliness and neuroses. There's no freedom, no exits, no light, no room to breathe.

The final shot, overlaid with the rock song "The Great Pretender" on the soundtrack, haunts.

A difficult, challenging, at times tedious work, with characters who are human in some very unpleasant ways. Not for an action-movie crowd or people who dig Spielbergian easy answers. "Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant" deserves applause for walking so unflinchingly on the dark and lonely side of the street.

Claustrophobic, talky and highly inventive – The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant is a key film in the development of R.W. Fassbinder's art. According to longtime colleague Ulli Lommel, Fassbinder wrote the entire work (which also became a play and, posthumously, a modernist opera) during an 11 hour plane journey from Germany to LA. Excited by this flush of creativity, Fassbinder ordered his entourage to head straight back home and shot the entire film in a extraordinary 10 days.

Set wholly within one room in the home of successful fashion designer Petra Von Kant, the film deals with the destructive love affair Petra (Margit Carstensen) begins with aspiring model Karin (Hanna Schygulla). As one of Fassbinder's early forays into the reexamination of 1950's Hollywood melodrama, the film has the tendency to polarise audiences with it's highly stylised and almost stagy approach. Even the lack of incidental music may jar with those not familiar with the director's work. Rather than using a swelling score giving cues to the emotions the audience is meant to feel, Fassbinder opts instead for selective natural sound (a typewriter endlessly clacking away in the background during an important scene, for instance) and records from Von Kant's (i.e. Fassbinder's) record collection. Without this trapping, we watch Petra's self-destruction with a certain ambiguity and a more considered response is elicited from the viewer. More space is also given to the magnificent dialogue and inventive camera-work (shot in long, winding takes) which allows the fine ensemble cast to to plunder the depths of emotional despair, all the while dressed in Von Kant's wonderfully outrageous designs.

This is all the more fascinating when read as a thinly veiled confession of Fassbinder's domineering ways with those in his inner circle. As also pointed out by Lommel, the film's exclusively female characters were actually all based on men. Fassbinder, however, mostly preferred to work with women as he felt they were freer to express extreme states of emotional truth and more open to the requirements of high melodrama. As a primer for the great director's work, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant is an excellent example of Fassbinder's over-riding theme: how the hunter can quickly become the victim and that the universality of desire and need within all human relationships is a constant, regardless of status, sexuality or age.

"The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" (1972) - was the first Fassbinder's film I saw many years ago in Moscow and it had started my fascination and interest in the work of the enormously talented man who was a writer/director/producer/editor/actor for almost all his movies. "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" is a screen adaptation of the earlier Fassbinder's play and it never leaves the apartment of Petra Von Kant, an arrogant, sarcastic, and successful fashion designer who constantly mistreats and humiliates her always silent and obedient assistant Marianne (Irm Hermann, with whom Fassbinder made 24 movies). As a background for Petra's apartment, Fassbinder uses the blowup of Poussin's painting "Midas and Bacchus." The use of the mural is ironic on more than one level. Nude Bacchus stands in the center of the mural and is the only male presence in a film populated entirely with women. Petra, not unlike legendary Midas wished for herself a golden girl, young and beautiful Karin with golden hair (Hanna Schygulla, another Fassbinder's muse with whom he made over 20 films). As with Midas from legend, it turned to be a huge mistake for Petra who learned herself what abuse, indifference, and humiliation meant. With just a few characters locked in the claustrophobic and suffocating atmosphere of the apartment, the film is never slow or boring thanks to the young director/writer story-telling ability and to magic camera work by Michael Ballhaus ("Goodfellas", "The Last Temptation of Christ", and "After Hours" among others). It is hard to believe that such a gorgeous looking movie was shot for ten days only. I've read that Fassbinder was able to make so many movies in such a short period of time because they were cheaply produced - no special effects, no big action scenes, no exotic locations. This is true but his movies are most certainly not cheap - highly intelligent, thought provoking, always excellently acted and beautiful or perhaps I've been lucky and have not seen the ones that don't fit the description.

9.5/10