Roulette chinoise

Chinese Roulette is about a marriage. An upper class couple split up for the weekend, each has told lies to the other regarding their destination, however both end up at the same destination with lovers in tow, the schloss in the countryside. This has been carefully machinated by their young disabled daughter who has known of the affairs of her parents for many years.

The scene where Herr Christ and lover walk in on Madame Christ and lover is pretty good, there's initial shock, then they manage to dissociate from their roles and have a good chuckle about it together. Thus begins the weekend.

The daughter arrives and insists on a game of Chinese Roulette, this is an interesting little game. You get two teams of four people, the first team picks a person from the other in a secret conclave. The second team then has to guess who is the person in their team who has been chosen by asking nine questions, of the form, "if this person was a magazine, which magazine would they be?". Anyway the game gets pretty cruel if you want to play it that way, "Which would be the most fitting method of execution for the person in question" for example. You could find titillation in the game by praising someone without them knowing who you are referring to or dark joy in deeply insulting them.

The daughter has arranged it all to grind the adults down. I suppose if there is one message of the film it's that if you breed adders you shouldn't be surprised if they grow up and eat you. The couple have clearly not provided for their daughter (other than materially speaking - she has whatever she wants, chocolates dolls, pretty dresses &c).

The game is an exercise in cruelty, a couple of the answers being pretty good. However there is a lot of insecurity, everyone is wondering if the person who is being described as an apple with a worm inside it is them, furthermore the person answering the question is often blatantly prejudiced and is not understanding the person they are speaking about.

There are some pretty bizarre things going on, the butler-type Gabriel writes unsound doggerel and reads it aloud to the couples (previously only one couple at a time). There are references to a character we never see, strange complicities, unexplained relationships.

One thing you can say though is that the movie is shot brilliantly, there are some wonderful circular shots (trademark of Scorsese and Fassbinder regular collaborator Michael Ballhaus) where the camera orbits the characters, lots of shots of people reflected off glass or cut in two by doorways, some exquisite framing. Perhaps the most exquisite movie I've seen in visual terms. The score too is of a very high calibre.

I take it as a pretty mystical film, one scene that is great is the daughter sat in her bed talking to Gabriel, the camera is at floor level just behind a row of the dolls which she has arranged as a kind of adoring audience for her. You feel like one of the dolls really, it's quite strange. Certainly Fassbinder is railing against certain bourgeois modes here. The characters are isolated by their feelings of self-worth, their deceptions, their victim status, and their sharp tongues, there's no love anywhere. In every relationship in the movie I felt as if it were one possessing the other, as if a trinket.

It's nastiness all around, almost an exercise in misanthropy, another reviewer referred to it as an exercise in deception as a survival tactic. I recently titled a review of mine, "A manual on how to live", well this really is "A manual on how not to live". It's as disparaging to victims as to victimisers. One of Fassbinder's other movies was called Satan's Brew and I really think this one could have been as well .

"Chinese Roulette", directed by R.W. Fassbinder (1976), is kind of a minimalist work, and, as it turns out, the quite right surrounding for a very special form of social terrorism as executed by a child.

Also simple is the structure of the characters - and the more impressive, when you see during the movie which Eigen-dynamics it discloses: Gerhard Christ and his wife Ariane have a marriage that is founded on money. He has a girlfriend - the Parisian Irene, she has a boyfriend - the husband's collaborator Kolbe. But these are not the only couples in the movie: There is also mother Kast and son, Gabriel. And then there is an informal couple, Gerhard and Arianes daughter Angela and her nurse Traunitz. (Watch the names: Christ, Ariane vs. Irene, Gabriel, Angela. Who is the devil? The arch-angel Gabriel's mother or daughter Angela "the angel"?).

Since everybody lied on everybody telling one another that they are going to Oslo, Milano and to the Zoo, they all meet quite unexpectedly in the family-castle. Now, everybody is unable to have his privacy with his respective boy- and girlfriend. So, one drinks and is bored until the handicapped daughter Angela desires to play "Chinese Roulette" (a play that has been invented by R.W. Fassbinder as a verbal analogy to Russian Roulette). Fassbinder said concerning this movie in an interview in my translation: "I think that relationships between humans are largely defined by conflicts. If I sit at my desk and just write something down without reflecting much, then there will probably be written more about conflicts than about attentions between humans".

Like most Fassbinder films, it's seemingly simple, but there's a lot too it when you walk a bit closer. This one sets up a great tragicomic situation: a disabled teenager manipulates her parents each to bring their lover to their summer mansion for the weekend. When the father arrives with his lover (Anna Karina, in a very quiet role), he finds his wife pinned to the floor by her boy toy. A bit later the daughter arrives with her caretaker (and possibly her lover?) who is deaf and mute. Mrs. Kast and her blonde son, Gabriel, take care of the mansion, cook, and so forth. Kast is played by Brigitte Mira, who was so wonderful two years earlier in Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul. She's a lot more cruel in this one.

With the situation as it is, their true characters quickly rise to the surface. The parents get the most time; father is loving in his way, but his love is probably only a result of the guilty feelings he has towards his daughter. Mother, on the other hand, is quite the psycho. At one point, as she sees her daughter lumbering along on her crutches from a second story window, she picks up a pistol and aims it at her daughter's back. She uses no euphemisms: her daughter, she believes, has ruined her life.

Fassbinder's direction is exquisite. His framing is so complex, but it's invented to look simple. The simple set might be called stagey by those who are not paying enough attention. When the four lovers meet, Fassbinder circles the camera around them as they pace around each other, creating a dizzying dance. Peer Raben's gorgeous and unique music also should be pointed out.

Not everything works out perfectly. The titular game is an interesting idea to do on film. The eight characters split into two groups, the first picks a person in the house and the second has to guess after they've asked a certain number of questions. I think Fassbinder has a difficult time making the questions and answers meaningful for the film as a whole. These exchanges get a little ponderous as a result, and the only thing that keeps the sequence alive is Raben's score. Like I said, it was quite a daring thing to do, so the fact that it doesn't work out perfectly doesn't harm the film too much. 9/10.

Sometimes directors guarantee a place in Cinematography Hall of Fame and all of a sudden every work from them become masterpieces. "Chinesisches roulette" is a nice example of an overrated movie. The messed up family and the psychological battles are nice, but no espectacular work for sure. The actors sometimes seem to be intentionally exaggerating, sounding and looking completely artificial. Save a coin for the little girl. Das ist alles.

Believing that her parents' longtime extramarital affairs caused her physical ailments, a teenage cripple arranges for both sets of adulterers to unexpectedly meet at a country home in this Rainer Werner Fassbinder thriller. The film is gloriously photographed by Michael Ballhaus, with the camera giddily spinning around to reflect nervousness when the four adulterers first meet, and the very deliberate framing (some actors turned to faced the camera; others not) throughout adds tension. The juice of the film comes from both the girl's initially elusive motives and the sense of emotions about to explode; at one point, her own mother almost shoots her through an open window. Oddly, the film never explores why the daughter has more hostility towards her mother (and vice versa) than her father, but this aside, the only significantly underwhelming aspect of the film is the title game. Nowhere near as dangerous as Russian roulette on the surface, Chinese roulette -- a game that seems to only exist in the film's universe -- is merely a guessing game of sorts, albeit one in which deep resentment is able to surface. Whatever the case, the film is a surprisingly tense ride considering the minimal sets and small cast. It also offers food for thought in terms of who is to blame and whether indeed the girl's parents brought the situation upon themselves through emotionally (if maybe not physically) injuring their daughter.