MSometimes French directors are like German philosophers: they turn an idea upside down. Francois Ozon could be trusted to be one of them. He likes to play with the templates he finds for his films and transform them. In “Peter von Kant” he reverses the gender swap that Rainer Werner Fassbinder once undertook in “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant”.
It’s part of the German director’s folklore that he drew a self-portrait in the title character and that her all-consuming love for the heartlessly unruly Karin (played by Hanna Schygulla) stems from his passion for the actor Günther Kaufmann. The riddle of the dedication of the film (for the one who “became Marlene here”) was quickly solved: the model of the jealously servile housekeeper is said to have been Fassbinder’s regular composer Peer Raben.
Another mystery is the question of why Ozon is once again filming an original by Fassbinder. It is one of the medium-sized films of this cinema year. However, the startling lack of panache exhibited by the film lends a certain urgency to this question.
“Peter von Kant” does not subject the menagerie of despair, exploitation and possession to a really original revision. He dresses them in a new ambience to let them act out.
Certainly, Denis Ménochet lends the unencrypted portrait of the director’s berserker French savoir vivre. As Peter von Kant’s mother, Hanna Schygulla can now do penance for the pain she once caused Petra. And bringing Isabelle Adjani back to the cinema after a long absence would have been celebrated earlier as a casting coup; but now, unearthly and porcelain-pale, she floats through an intrigue without giving it any melodramatic barbs.
There are several answers to the devastating question of the inner necessity of this remake. The first is discouraging: ozone is risk-averse. He celebrated his breakthrough around twenty years ago at the Berlinale with the adaptation of Fassbinder’s lost play “Drops on Hot Stones” (thanks to Tony Holiday’s “Tanze Samba mit mir”).
Pick up a successful scam
As the opening film of this year’s festival, “Peter von Kant” should be a double home game, since Fassbinder’s original premiered there 50 years earlier. Ozone has always been very adept at picking up a scam that has worked before.
An extravagant, but undoubtedly more sympathetic, solution would be for Ozon to retaliate on behalf of his idol. When “Tropfen aufhot Steine” was to be released in Germany, the distributor made the outrageous request that he downplay the Fassbinder reference: it would actually damage the commercial prospects. With this logic, Ozon turns his outrage at the time into a reparative homage.
“Peter von Kant” begins ostentatiously with a close-up of Fassbinder’s face. In the following film, the French director demonstrates that he is still the cheeky model student who knows the work of his teacher inside out, and this in both subtle and overt references (the German film poster is a cheeky plagiarism of Andy Warhol’s poster for “Querelle” ) can prove.
Does Francois Ozon shy away from the risk?
Which: © Jean-Claude Moireau
The third variant of an answer would now be that ozone hopes for an infectious effect. At first he had in common with Fassbinder the breathless pace of work and the fascination with manipulation; now he still shares his love of melodrama.
Their temperaments couldn’t be more different. Fassbinder was a genius of self-exposure (especially in “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant”), while Ozon hides discreetly behind his films (he does not reveal his private life on screen or in interviews). It may be due to a certain embarrassment when he follows the excessiveness of his role model with his new film: After the staging of his previous works was characterized by an almost academic cleanliness, a pinch of excess can’t hurt.
But you don’t reinvent yourself in repetition. And Ozone’s career strategy has been in pretty much trouble for quite some time. She once told of the happiness of the double track. On the one hand, he celebrated his greatest commercial successes (“8 Frauen”, “Das Schmuckstück”) as a postmodern ironist who cheerfully unhinged genre conventions. He reliably compensated for this tendency towards the mocking tabloidesque with serious character studies in which he dealt with loss and identity (“Unter dem Sand” “Die Zeit, die remnants”).
Both of these currents have since lost shape and commercial and creative credibility. Most recently, Ozon has gained a remarkable gravitas and maturity with the themed films “Gelobt sei Gott” and “Alles ist ist gut haben” (Everything is fine) that he probably doesn’t quite trust.
Has the ironic exhausted himself?
The basic problem of his cinema – the irony that rises above its subject and the characters – seemed to be eliminated. At least she wasn’t so clearly recognizable anymore. With “Peter von Kant” he tries to swing back into the more successful mode. It’s a slick set film, but the mockery of the fads of 1970s German fad falls short of the snarky possibilities. Has the ironic exhausted himself too much?
Of course, he has a lot of fun with the character of the majordomo Karl (Stéfan Crépon), who is a perfect substitute for Irm Hermann’s Marlene. He looks like someone ordered a portrait of Stan Laurel from Tom of Finland. He fulfills his various duties with amazing secrecy, serves champagne and prawns, serves his master as cameraman, editor and dialogue author. The real raison d’etre of this defiantly docile, however, is to be humiliated.
Hanna Schygulla and Denis Menochet in “Peter von Kant”
Those: © Carole Bethuel / 2022 FOZ
As his tormentor, Denis Ménochet does not necessarily play the role of Oliver Hardy. However, this actor has an extraordinary talent for suppressed anger and furiously calibrated outbursts of anger. He bears lightly on his massive frame as he roams through the cage of his solitude like a predator. He sheds tears, but they are not bitter, but hot-headed.
Ménochet has his character’s emotions written all over his face, but he’s not embarrassed. He understood that this film should be about surface and subtext. Perhaps more precisely than his director, who is satisfied with the thought game that he can pin down his idol with Peter von Kant.