François Ozon’s movie remake is an entirely new experience.
David Fincher’s stunt to make his Herman Mankiewicz biopic Mank look like Citizen Kane was asinine. But François Ozon’s Peter von Kant is ingenious. There’s perfect cinéaste reasoning to reimagine Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 classic The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as a quasi-biopic because its title character always personified Fassbinder’s love, filmmaking, and sexual obsessions.
These days, sexuality gets confused as the basis of Millennial identity, but Fassbinder knew better 50 years ago when conceiving his melodrama about Petra von Kant, a fashion designer–artiste who exploits her friends, family, and faithful retainer, selfishly satisfying her need for attention and affection. Ozon also knows better, contriving Peter von Kant to challenge contemporary sexual shibboleths.
Peter von Kant (played by Denis Ménochet) is a gay German filmmaker indulging himself in Seventies Köln/Cologne. He’s apolitical yet plays the celebrity privilege game in a slickly designed bedroom-office with proscenium-like window curtains to reveal or shut out the world. (The work/play space resembles the stylish film director’s home in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory.) Visitors to this shrine audition for Peter’s approval: slavish assistant Karl (Stefan Crepon), lead actress and muse Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani), his daughter Gabriele (Aminthe Audiard), and his mother (Hanna Schygulla). They witness Peter’s showing off and tantrums, but we see more because his behavior — particularly Ménochet’s performance, an utterly convincing and unguarded Fassbinder impersonation — lifts the proceedings beyond narcissistic display. Ozon’s complex narrative achieves sympathetic insight into the personality of one of the late 20th century’s great artists.
In Bitter Tears, Fassbinder deliberately imitated women’s film conventions by focusing on his heroine’s haughtiness and bisexual resilience. He satirized Hollywood luxe through her extravagant yet claustrophobic bedroom — featuring a blown-up backdrop of Poussin’s Baroque painting Midas and Bacchus and stocked with undressed mannequins. The design kept viewers aware of theatrical artifice, conscious of how Petra acts — manipulating her sycophants and a new, young lover. The visual scheme, plus expressive pop tunes “In My Room” and “The Great Pretender,” achieved the most effective Brechtian strategies in movie history.
So, for contemporary audiences, Ozon extends Fassbinder’s gambit by gender-switching Petra into Peter, an audacious reinvention of Fassbinder, the complicated artist and man. Ozon’s movie trickery plays on Fassbinder’s loneliness theme when Peter/Petra says, “Human beings need each other but haven’t learned to be two.”
In 2000, Ozon adapted Fassbinder’s play Water Drops on Burning Rocks, but Peter von Kant conjures an ultimate understanding of the filmmaker who most inspires him to achieve his own distinctive expression. (Ozon’s yearly output is almost as prolific as Fassbinder’s.) Ozon softens the cruelty that coursed through Bitter Tears, showing how Fassbinder owned up to it. He speeds up Fassbinder’s focus on gay-world ruthlessness and selfishness, modernizing the somnambulant pace that made Bitter Tears an enervating parade of disaffected types.
Peter still suffers the indifference of a new young paramour, Amir (Khalil Ben Gharbia), which is provocative enough for the Obergefell era. The bold behavior of these 1970s figures is still challenging: Peter’s coke-sniffing excess, Amir’s casual promiscuity, and their licentious mutual friend Sidonie bring back the uninhibited individuality denied by today’s sexual virtue-signalers.
Unlike Fassbinder’s melodramatic zombies, Ozon’s characters are enlivened movie icons: Peter’s screen test of Amir brings out a seductive Sal Mineo quality. Adjani’s ageless Sidonie is so beautiful that she’s dangerously untrustworthy. And Schygulla’s matriarch (she was the original love object in Bitter Tears) sweetens Fassbinder’s initial conception with a lullaby that imprints unconditional love. Ozon has learned richness and grace from the anguish and unfairness dramatized in Fassbinder’s example. Ménochet’s intrepid Fassbinder matches Elmer Bäck’s redefinition of a masculine cultural hero in Eisenstein in Guanajuato.
The queer-life critique in Terence Davies’s Benediction followed Fassbinder’s tough vision. The many-sided visual style of Bitter Tears conveyed the layers of insight needed for humans to relate to one another. Ozon uses his fluent film savvy (cinematographer Manuel Dacosse makes it gorgeous) to understand and reinterpret Bitter Tears for the age when Pride has smugly replaced Protest. (One streaming service recently, stupidly, mischaracterized Ozon’s By the Grace of God as “a scathing indictment of organized religion.”) Ozon knows that today’s queer culture overlooks the deep longing that gave Bitter Tears its power. That’s why Fassbinder’s fascinating film remains controversial when contemporary activists insist on idealized media role models rather than complicated life models. Ozon pays tribute to how Fassbinder fearlessly risked film-culture esteem. Watching Peter von Kant is an entirely new experience.
