Kritiken

The film drops the curtain of artifice as characters bare their souls and voice their most primitive emotional needs. Fassbinder elicits more naturalistic performances during these scenes and shoots some of them in close-up. It feels as though the director has broken through his style to achieve something universal and direct.

Over the course of 124 minutes, Hermann doesn't have a single line of dialogue. Yet from her first appearance to her final exit to the tune of the Platters' "The Great Pretender," Marlene's masochistic devotion to and unrequited love for Petra von Kant is soul-breaking to witness.

Like a lost chapter from Ovid's Metamorphoses, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant has the trappings of an ancient story of Gods and monsters: a stiff poetry of immeasurable beauty, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's magnificent romance transcends human drama.

Blatantly stagy and inventively cinematic, "Petra" is a movie in which every angle and each gesture is designed to map the shifting relations among the characters. Extended reaction shots are pregnant with meaning and, employing a strategy derived from his more underground colleague, the director Werner Schroeter, Fassbinder sets static tableaus to extended stretches of music (mainly the Platters and Verdi).

I have seen several stage productions of Bitter Tears down the years, and it is fascinating to realize how completely cinematically Fassbinder renders his own material, even as the text of the play is scrupulously respected. Michael Balhaus's cinematography, in concert with Fassbinder's mise en scène, keeps it inventive, with constantly changing perspectives, reframings, foreground/background switches and lighting effects.

This is arguably Fassbinder's first film to take full advantage of cinema's unique qualities—so much so, in fact, that it's sometimes difficult to imagine how it could have worked onstage. It functions reasonably well as a straightforward, agonized melodrama, but it's first and foremost a master class in the dynamic visual use of a constricted space, and proof that a tiny budget is no excuse.

Petra's sadomasochist ordeal was autobiographical and evidently therapeutic for Fassbinder. He admitted that his volatile affair with the actor Günther Kaufmann had brought him close to the edge. If so, Bitter Tears is an exorcism by ritual self-abasement.

Bitter Tears offers a sensory feast that's expanded on by the elaborate dialogue, which is poetic even as translated into English, and by the astonishingly sensual and fluid movements of the actors and the camera.

Relationships to Fassbinder are waltzes of power shifts and eclipses, life's "codes of behavior" are laid bare as the frozen, flattened poses of melodrama. His characters spear each other with words only to beg for forgiveness, weep through blank visages, laugh raucously without the slightest hint of mirth.

The most perfect example of "the woman's film" I've seen in thirty years presents a number of that genre's key elements. Its subject matter incorporates numerous progressive and self-consciously female topics– both in narrative themes and in role models– and the film even makes use of some of the dominant strains of academic feminist film theory.

An early watershed in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's career as a filmmaker, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), his twelfth feature, might even be regarded as the first in which he explicitly "discovered" mise en scène. Adapting his own play... the film makes no effort to "open up" the original material in terms of its original setting, the flat of its title heroine, and it focuses on issues of camera placement and camera movement like few other Fassbinder films made before or since.

The film is a fascinating but strange document of the trickle-down effects of power and an even stranger observation of the way women treat and sometimes enslave each other, but Fassbinber's galvanizing aesthetic approach to the material, however fitting, is so unbearably oppressive that it borders on the pathological. For his audience, the only points of departure are the high-camp exchanges between the film's actresses.