Film review

  • Peter von Kant

    Old YorkerFilm review

    François Ozon (2022)

    An introductory caption acknowledges the source material but François Ozon has already used an image to make clear his inspiration.  The first thing we see, on a red screen, is a photograph of the upper part of a man’s face:  the eyes, behind spectacles, are unmistakably those of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  At the very end of the closing credits there’s another photo of Fassbinder, this time with Hanna Schygulla – who’s in the cast of Ozon’s film and also appeared, fifty years ago, in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), from which Peter von Kant is ‘freely adapted’.  Where Fassbinder’s Petra was a fashion designer, Ozon’s Peter is a film director.  In the burly person of Denis Ménochet, he bears more than a passing resemblance to Fassbinder (once he’d put on weight in the last years of his short life).  Ozon commemorates the prime mover of his drama in unusually explicit ways.

    The similarities and differences between Peter and Petra are very interesting – provided that you come to the former already interested in the work of Ozon or Fassbinder or both.  Each film comprises six characters – all are women in the Fassbinder, three are men in the Ozon:  the other two roles to transition are the protagonist’s live-in personal-assistant-cum-doormat and Petra/Peter’s heartless heart’s desire (the role played by Schygulla in the original).  Fassbinder’s cast was German and spoke German.  Except for Schygulla, Ozon’s cast is French and mostly speaks French.   (The French-German intersection also recalls the casting, themes and title of Ozon’s Frantz (2016).)  The location of the story hasn’t changed country, though it has changed city – from Bremen to Cologne.  Ozon’s film (85 minutes) is much shorter than Fassbinder’s (124 minutes) but its timeframe is longer:  in the course of the action, Peter’s latest inamorato, Amir (Khalil Ben Gharbia), becomes a movie star, thanks largely to the older man who’s obsessed with him.  The date is still 1972, which retains the non-conformist charge of the main character’s sexual history and evokes Fassbinder’s own.  Although the actor playing Amir is French, he’s evidently of North African ancestry, which brings to mind Fassbinder’s unhappy relationship with El Hedi ben Salem, the Moroccan who co-starred in Fear Eats the Soul (1974).

    The music that Peter puts on his record player includes the Walker Brothers’ ‘In My Room’, which also featured on the soundtrack of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.  Although ‘In My Room’ dates only from 1966, Peter describes it as a song ‘from my youth’ (a remark that evokes another lavishly regretful ballad:  Charles Aznavour’s ‘Yesterday When I Was Young’).  ‘In My Room’ was a thoroughly apt theme song for Petra von Kant all of whose ‘action’ took place inside the title character’s apartment.  Ozon likewise stays in Peter’s apartment for the most part though Peter can’t be conducting his film-making career entirely within these four walls.  Despite mention of an empty diary, he does more than make phone calls to launch Amir into the big time – so successfully that, within a few months, his protégé no longer needs Peter’s help, let alone the burden of his furious possessiveness.  There are also occasional exterior shots of the courtyard of Peter’s apartment building and, in the closing stages, sequences inside a taxi and on a Cologne street that involve Amir and Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani), Peter’s long-time leading lady and muse.  The opening up of the material (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant began life as a stage play) hardly detracts from one’s sense of Peter as almost physically trapped in his abuse of other people and himself, and in his obsessions.

    For a few minutes at the start, Peter von Kant threatens to be no more than high-end camp.  But once Ozon has completed his introduction of the film’s world of extraordinary appearances – the décor of Peter’s apartment (which surely owes something to Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory (2019), as well as to Fassbinder’s original), the characters’ faces and clothes:  all splendidly captured in Manuel Dacosse’s cinematography – the drama develops emotional momentum.   This is thanks chiefly to Denis Ménochet’s fearless portrait of the incandescently desperate, coke-sniffing Peter but the whole cast is strong.  Aminthe Audiard is gently affecting as Peter’s teenage daughter, Gabriele.  The implacable beauty of both Isabelle Adjani and Khalil Ben Gharbia gives Sidonie and Amir an almost sinister power – a licence to be licentious.  Sidonie brings Amir into Peter’s life.  Once Amir escapes Peter’s clutches, she enjoys the young man herself – and he her (although Amir is finally a more ambivalent figure than his counterpart in Petra von Kant’s story).  Flawed, needy Peter, for all that he has made them in cinema, can’t hope to control the likes of Amir and Sidonie off-set.

    His comically skinny, staring-eyed vassal Karl (Stéfan Crépon), who might seem even needier than Peter, proves to be a worm that turns memorably.   When his tantrums and demands have driven the rest of his inner circle away, Peter decides to be nice to Karl:  the servant lets his master hold him close before spitting in his face and making his own exit.  Hanna Schygulla, once Petra’s love object-tormentor, is now Peter’s mother, Rosemarie.  Schygulla’s presence in Ozon’s film, by supplying a bridge back to Fassbinder’s, enriches Peter von Kant throughout, never more so than when Rosemarie, at the end of his doomed birthday party, sings to her physically and emotionally prostrate son a German lullaby.

    To return to the proviso at the start of this note’s second paragraph …   The commercial appeal of Peter von Kant is limited, to the say the least.  There may only be six people on the screen but that’s twice as many as were at the Curzon Richmond screening I went to (the figure of three includes me).   Although I found it more involving than the film that inspired it, I kept wondering, as I watched, about what François Ozon had and hadn’t changed, and whether the much shorter running time of Peter von Kant was a virtual acknowledgement on his part that this is a cinéaste exercise (albeit that Ozon’s characteristic wit ensures it’s never drily academic).  I’m still in two minds about this but impressed that the film’s meanings seem to have expanded in the fortnight since I saw it.  It now feels less a remake than an oblique, imaginative part-biopic of Fassbinder.  Peter von Kant is also a subtle but trenchant illustration of the huge changes in the presentation and cultural reception of same-sex desire that have occurred in the last half-century:  plenty of what these 1970s people say and do still startles.  When Hanna Schygulla sings that lullaby, her voice, in beautifying the moment, also suggests François Ozon’s own admiring affection for Rainer Werner Fassbinder – the gratitude of a present-day gay film-maker to a queer pioneer in cinema.

    4 January 2023

  • The Red Shoes

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1948)

    The Technicolor and the exotic settings – Paris, Monte Carlo – must have entranced audiences in post-war austerity Britain (although the film was a bigger commercial hit in New York).  As in Powell and Pressburger’s preceding picture, Black Narcissus (1947), the visual imagination at work here is awesome but The Red Shoes is very differently esteemed.  Black Narcissus, peopled mainly by sex-starved-and-hungry nuns, is widely regarded as brilliantly expressionist kitsch.  The Red Shoes is not only a ballet film but also features, in the cast, in the dancing and on the choreography credits, real great names of the ballet world – Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine.  (Marie Rambert makes a cameo appearance.)  In other words, it has authentic artistry in front of the camera, as well as behind it – part of why The Red Shoes is considered by plenty of cinéastes a great film.  (As of last month, it achieved a place in Sight & Sound’s top-100 poll of critics et al and hence a place in the current BFI programme celebrating all the entries in that line-up.)  The visual depth and the amazingly rich colour combinations, devised and achieved by Michael Powell and DP Jack Cardiff, are truly a wonder.  The script, by Emeric Pressburger with additional dialogue by Keith Winter, is a different matter.  All in all, I’m not sure The Red Shoes is a cut above Black Narcissus and I don’t think it’s as entertaining.

    Music student Julian Craster (Marius Goring) is in the audience at Covent Garden for a performance by the Ballet Lermontov of ‘Heart of Fire’.  The score has supposedly been composed by Julian’s teacher, Professor Palmer (Austin Trevor); Julian soon realises the music has been nicked from one of his own compositions.  At an after-show party hosted by socialite Lady Neston (Irene Browne), her niece, Victoria (Vicky) Page (Moira Shearer), ballet-mad and an aspiring dancer, is introduced to Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), impresario of the company that bears his name and who invites Vicky to one of their rehearsals.  Julian meanwhile writes to Lermontov to protest Palmer’s plagiarism and gains an audience with the great man.  After hearing Julian play one of his own pieces at the piano, Lermontov offers him a job on the spot – as répétiteur to the company orchestra and deputy to Livingstone Montague (Esmond Knight), the orchestra’s senior conductor.  Thrilled to accept Lermontov’s invitation, Vicky and Julian turn up at the theatre the same day and soon are both leading lights with the Ballet Lermontov.  Vicky gets the chance to dance and Lermontov sees her potential.  He creates a new ballet in which she’ll have the starring role and for which Julian will write the music:  ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale The Red Shoes, whose selfish, dance-crazy (anti-)heroine falls under the spell of the title footwear, with macabre results.

    The new ballet – staged by Powell and Pressburger as an uninterrupted, seventeen-minute sequence – is a huge hit. Vicky becomes the company’s prima ballerina; Julian is commissioned to write new scores.  They work closely together and fall in love – to the fury of the (Diaghilev-like) Lermontov, who’s furiously possessive of his stars.  Julian is fired and Vicky leaves the company to marry him but Lermontov then persuades her to ‘put on the red shoes again’ and reprise the role that made her name.  On the first night of the revival in Monte Carlo, Julian, who should have been conducting the premiere of his opera at Covent Garden, confronts Vicky in her dressing room.  He begs her to abandon the performance and return with him to England.  Lermontov insists that her true destiny is with him and a life on stage.  She opts for the latter and her vanquished husband leaves for the railway station but the red shoes Vicky’s wearing for her role have other ideas.  They propel her from the theatre to the station.  Julian sees and runs towards her but Vicky leaps from a balcony into the path of an approaching train.  Back at the theatre, a stunned Lermontov comes onstage to inform the audience that ‘Miss Page is unable to dance tonight – nor indeed any other night’.  In honour of Vicky, the company goes ahead with the performance.  A moving spotlight indicates the empty space she should have occupied.

    As a melodramatic exploration of the artistic calling as a matter of life and death (to quote another Archers title), The Red Shoes is far superior to a grim, up-itself imitator like Black Swan (2010).  Powell and Pressburger supply choreography not just in the dance sections but in less expected places too: in the movement of the opening sequence, as students burst into Covent Garden and dash for seats in the gods; in Anton Walbrook’s intricate, elegant hand movements.  Except for Walbrook, Marius Goring and Esmond Knight, though, the cast are pretty hard to take – especially Massine, who, as the dancer Grischa Ljubov, pantomimes even when Ljubov is offstage.  Moira Shearer is lovely in her first scenes – her face expresses Vicky’s innocence very naturally – and her litheness as a dancer is, at least in long retrospect, poignant.  As the doomed heroine of ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’, Shearer lets her dancing do the talking but her limitations are exposed as Vicky Page gets more lines to speak.  She simply isn’t a good enough actress to dramatise the character’s art-versus-love dilemma convincingly.  The climax to ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’, which occurs halfway through the film, is highly effective.  The staging of Vicky’s tragic end, which concludes things, is garishly shoddy.  As the theatre performance from which she’s unavoidably absent ends, Vicky lies on a stretcher, bleeding to death, and asks Julian to remove her red shoes.

    2 January 2023

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