I stayed up late watching The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant Fassbinder's 1973 film of a play he had written years earlier, then stayed up even later watching it again with the Audio Commentary. The film consists of five scenes, and we never leave the bedroom, which doubles as a design studio.

Margit Carstensen was superb as the title character, Petra Von Kant, a rich, histrionic fashion designer who has just divorced her second husband. She is fantastically anorexic, dresses as if she were going to the opera, and switches into different wigs in each scene of the film. She bullies the silent Marlene, played by Irm Hermann, her secretary and assistant, who appears to be designing all the clothes. Her friend Sidonie, a Baroness, comes to visit, mostly to gloat over Petra's unhappiness following her divorce. And she brings in Karin, played by Hanna Schygulla, a young married woman from the lower classes. Karin married and moved to Australia after her father murdered her mother and then killed himself. She's back in Germany looking to start anew. Petra falls in love with her, and promised to make Karin into a fashion model.

The movie is played out against an enormous photo-mural of Nicolas Poussin's Midas and Bacchus with a naked Bacchus standing in the center. Scenes are framed through the many crossbeams, bannisters and slatted blinds around the room, and several naked mannequins stand like silent, impassive observers, not unlike the mysterious Marlene.

Fassbinder was, by all accounts, a frightening, sadistic and out of control man. He slept with everyone, men and women, did massive amounts of drugs, prowled leather bars, pimped Ugo Kier, threw screaming fits in public, beat women until they ended up hospitalized, brutalized the actors in his films and finally died freebasing cocaine. But he made incredible movies.

LINK | 4:30 PM | TB

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