1972 ‘Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant’ Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Petra von Kant is a successful fashion designer -- arrogant, caustic, and self-satisfied. She mistreats Marlene (her secretary, maid, and co-designer). Enter Karin, a 23-year-old beauty who wants to be a model. Petra falls in love with Karin and invites her to move in.
As Lágrimas Amargas de Petra von Kant, 페트라 폰 칸트의 쓰디쓴 눈물
Moving relationship stories Humanity and the world around us gay, sexual, relationships, feelings or homophobic sex, sexual, relationships, erotic or sensual marriage, emotion, romance, feelings or relationships artists, biography, musician, songs or emotional historical, royalty, sumptuous, lavish or drama Show All…
rainer werner fassbinder and his films are the most relatable because i too am german, gay, and in a constant state of emotional crisis with huge anxiety and a penchant for the theatrical
the reason this is all set in one room is because they blew their whole budget on those wigs
A scathing assessment of relationships, femininity and power, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant is a lipstick massacre that drags you through shards of broken gin bottles chasing a vision of love. A chamber piece based on Fassbinder’s early play, this moral tale unfolds over a number of years in a single location, the bedroom of elitist fashion designer Petra Von Kant. Obsessed with self-image and living a life of seclusion, this caustic femme fatale aims to control all spheres of her life since the dissolution of her tortuous marriage. Now fiercely independent Petra takes up the mantle of man-of-the-house, relentlessly barking spiteful orders at her mute subservient assistant Marlene. The introduction of an 18 year old aspiring model, Karin…
What Fassbinder can do here in one room, other directors couldn't even do in a whole house.
Genuinely one of the most impressive films I've seen on a formal level, Fassbinder navigating the single room in which the film takes place in with such an elegant, gifted eye for composition that it boggles the mind the entire film was shot in only 14 days. His frames seem to utilise both bodies and architecture as a means for expression, interested in the abstract, expressionistic shapes which seem to continually form between and around his broken, damaged characters. There's an intangible quality to his images, something about the combination of blocking and framing which seems to work on an almost instinctual level for me (this shot here for example, which on the surface seems like a relatively simple game…
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every human being a whorl of dust, loose hair, food debris, flame retardant-laced sofa cushion chunks, parts of bugs, ash, dead cells shed, whatever we were before we were us in opposition/oscillation : bad vibes or no vibes at all, a precipitous drop-off, a galaxy, and like every galaxy rotation furthers, turning the outer edge of the saw from the center of, the lp in silent-ish motion before the needle, what is there pulling and tearing and absorbing, eating light and sound until purges of light, purges of sound, columns feather into a pliant void, soft and intermingled, a serration, a withdrawal
a glamour conjured, ,a glamour dispelled
this was exactly what i had expected it to be, and i am so happy it was.
sometimes you watch films that just feel as though are speaking to you almost directly, which may seem strange for this film, but i’m sure anyone who’s seen it will know what i mean.
Fassbinder was a mastermind; also how fucking badass that this was an all-female cast.
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When you can foresee the end from the start, is the experience alone worth it?
isn’t it strange how we can so quickly lose ourselves for the love and affection of another?
love seems to be one of the most natural inclinations of the human mind, a feeling that we are all to experience…
Projections of desire. An idealized lover molded and sculpted to fit those precise proportions of your delicate sensuous proclivities. Instead of a human with their own thoughts, feelings, needs and wants, you search for a canvas, a model to handcraft: a mannequin—this is what you seek. This can only lead to your own internal disaster. A self-sabatoge so profoundly oblivious that it becomes obvious, yet you still ignore all of the signs. Those walls of reservation you built up so high after your last heartbreak which you were, unbeknownst to you, the root cause of—when you swore you would never again allow yourself to let someone in, no matter how appealing or quixotic—at the first sign of a potential paragon…
