Fassbinder

A dream prospect. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the short-lived, self-destructive wünderkind who made movies about love as masochism, pain as an inevitable condition and history as a dire weight upon his native Germany, has long been in need of an equally forthright celebration. And who better to provide it than one-time NME star, cultural contrarian and film nut Ian Penman, in his first original book since his great comeback suite of music essays, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, in 2019? Well, hold your…

François Ozon made a breakthrough in his film-making career in 2000 with an adaptation of an unproduced stage play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Water Drops on Burning Rocks. Now, to open this year’s Berlin film festival, he has returned to the dark master of New German Cinema with a gender-switched version of Fassbinder’s 1972 movie The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, that strange, angular, claustrophobic drama in which only women appear on screen.Fassbinder’s film is set entirely in the apartment of a fashion designer…

Director François Ozon has had something of a lifelong creative crush on Rainer Werner Fassbinder. An early career breakthrough for Ozon came with the mannered but amusing ménage-à-quatre Water Drops on Burning Rocks, based on a stage play that Fassbinder wrote when he was still in his teens. Now Ozon consummates his ongoing flirtation with the German auteur with his latest picture, a gender-swapped reworking of Fassbinder’s 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.French actor Denis Ménochet stars as Peter, a…