Opening with Peter von Kant, the protagonist is no longer a woman but the director himself who was the symbol of the new German cinema. . An autobiographical story of jealousies and a mad falling in love with a boy who came out of nowhere. Germany has forgotten it
BERLIN With her burly physique, Denise Mnochet credible in the size of Rainer Werner Fassbinder when she was in adulthood: old age did not know her, the director of the new German cinema died at 37, in 1982. Ten years earlier he had brought to the Berlinale The bitter tears of Petra von Kant. After 50 years, the festival in a ghostly atmosphere (closed shops, few people, continuous checks, daily tests), opens with Peter von Kant, free adaptation by Franois Ozon: This film is about jealousy and domination. With age I understood Fassbinder better, the way of seeing his life. Not a friendly guy and his movies aren’t. I wanted people to find it despicable and a minute later vulnerable, grotesque, touching.
The female protagonists of this homosexual story, with Ozon are men. Fashion designer Petra, who was played by Margit Carstensen, becomes director Mnochet, none other than Fassbinder. He had protected himself behind the designer, that was already an autobiographical story, he had made her lesbian a personal story of her with an actor. I wanted to shoot a version in which to identify myself more directly, I took a classic and put it in a different context, with modern eyes. The boy who bewitched him, orphan, of humble origins, came from nowhere (friend of Isabelle Adjani in the role of a singer), in the original version he is an actress and has the face of Hanna Schygulla, who became the gaze at the cinema by Fassbinder: Now Hanna plays director Peter’s mother in a cameo.
There are themes dear to the tormented poet of cinema who died young, Ozon makes it clear from the eyes inhabited by a sweet despair of Mnochet: There is amiability and unpleasantness, there is loneliness that makes people aggressive. He needs to hear his voice but that ungrateful one who knows where. Behind this burning and neurotic passion, the moral emptiness. He said that in love he always loses who he loves most, that all men kill what they love, that love is a tool to dominate the partner. There is the dominator and the dominated.
Love and power, we are not that far from Me Too. Ozon (at his sixth Berlinale) says he prophesied what would happen next. And for Germany has Fassbinder forgotten, the context changed, is there no more capitalism versus communism? They consider him old-fashioned because his political vision lasts and you don’t want to see yourself in the mirror. In France, however, still popular, I learned a lot from him about human relations, I consider him a sort of big brother. As a boy, out of boredom, I sneaked out of the room that Wim Wenders was showing to go see Fassbinder.
February 10, 2022 (change February 10, 2022 | 20:54)
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