The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1972)
Kenneth Robinson may have been a professional reactionary rather than a film critic but I used to read his reviews in The Spectator in the 1970s and will always remember his piece about this film, in which he complained that Petra von Kant was a very boring woman and that her lying in bed all day – a bed with white sheets – made matters worse. Robinson kept hoping she would get up and out and meet a nice man in a dark suit against whom the subtitles would be clearly legible. Watching the film, as I did for the first time this week, it’s soon evident there’s no chance of a meeting of the kind Robinson hoped for because Petra has evolved from failed marriages to lesbianism. The only men we see in the course of the movie are in pictures: the naked or half-naked figures in a huge mural on the bedroom wall of Petra’s Bremen apartment (according to Wikipedia, it’s a reproduction of Poussin’s ‘Midas and Bacchus’); and a black-and-white photograph in a newspaper, featuring Petra, Karin (the young woman who, at Petra’s behest, becomes a successful model and with whom her mentor becomes obsessed), and an unnamed man, who is Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder made Petra von Kant when he was twenty-six. It was released in West Germany in 1972 (and in the USA in 1973), the same year which also saw the release of The Merchant of Four Seasons and three pieces of television work by him (one a five-episode series). Petra von Kant is an astonishing achievement of sorts and looks like nothing else I’ve seen but Kenneth Robinson was right that it and its heroine are boring (even if the subtitles aren’t in fact that hard to read). I dozed without compunction in the fairly early stages and often thought of walking out later on.
Fassbinder was bisexual but predominantly homosexual. His one marriage, to Ingrid Caven, lasted from 1970 to 1972 and it’s hard not to see a nexus of autobiographical elements in Petra von Kant. Its central character has abandoned heterosexual relationships. She’s an internationally successful fashion designer. Her apartment (the whole of the film takes place there) is peopled by female mannequins. Echoing the men in the mural, they’re naked or semi-clothed (with bits of costume designed by Petra desultorily draped around them: once Karin is no longer sharing Petra’s bed, two of the mannequins are placed in it, making love to each other). The female characters in the story – Petra, Karin, Petra’s mother, daughter Gaby and cousin Sidonie, and her live-in companion Marlene – are Fassbinder’s equivalent of his protagonist’s mannequins. They wear clothes and hairdos (in Petra’s case at least, wigs) that are startlingly coloured but which have a stylising effect and turn the women into artefacts. As his appearance in the newspaper photograph implies, Fassbinder, like Petra, is part of a creative world in which women are fashioned. He dedicates the film to ‘One who became a Marlene’ and he had a relationship with Irm Hermann, the actress who plays Marlene. Petra treats the mutely subservient Marlene shabbily but it’s Marlene who brings about the end of the film. When Petra regrets the way she’s behaved towards her, promises to do better and asks her to say more about who she really is and what she really feels, it’s the last straw for the masochistic Marlene. She takes her leave and with her the doll that Sidonie gave to Petra as a birthday present – a naked doll (a miniature mannequin) with Karin’s distinctive hairstyle.
The above may imply some plot developments but these are essentially variations on a theme which is obvious very soon. This is the fundamental weakness of Petra von Kant. You take in the soulless artificiality of Petra’s apartment and assume that it represents her way of being and perhaps her personality. You watch Petra manipulating the people around her and hear her (listen to her would be overstating it) theorise about life and love. You know she has to get her comeuppance. That this is inevitable rather than predictable doesn’t lend the film any dramatic strength – nor does Margit Carstensen’s playing of Petra. Of course she’s arresting but, once you’ve registered the lupine smile, the teeth behind the lips that suggest the skull beneath the skin, you’ve got the whole portrait. This performance required a lot of technical skill and is made up of a lot of evidently calculated effects. Yet although it’s impossible to find Petra’s egocentric psychodrama affecting, I still felt uncomfortable at the audience laughter in NFT1 (weirdly denuded of most of its seating in preparation for refurbishment). The laughter was probably admiring of Fassbinder – the programme note included the usual stuff about his grasp of Hollywood tropes, reactivation of soap melodramatics etc – but I wasn’t sure he meant us to laugh at Petra. (I did, once, when Margit Carstensen seemed, once, to struggle to keep up with the rapid sequence of Petra’s answering the phone, desperately hoping Karin’s on the other end of it, and slamming down the receiver when she isn’t.) It’s odd and discomfiting that, while Fassbinder may be examining and satirising his own motivations as an artist and his own attitudes towards women here, the effect is to make the women ridiculous – except for Hanna Schygulla, who plays Karin. She’s such a good actress that she’s able both to embody the type she’s playing and to individualise her. Karin is a sensualist who’s as shrewd as she’s unreflective: Schygulla’s cruel insouciance, which nearly destroys Petra, is very witty. With the possible exception of Eva Mattes, as the daughter, no one else in the cast suggests a human being. Irm Hermann, Katrin Schaake (Sidonie) and Gisela Fackeldey (Petra’s mother) are all striking presences but they all remain strictly within their director-designer’s control.
26 July 2011