“Pure camp is always naive,” Susan Sontag wrote in Notes on Camp, her 1965 tract. “Camp which knows itself to be camp is usually less satisfying.”
François Ozon’s gender-switched remake of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is the exception that tests the rule.
No film featuring the robust Denis Ménochet (Inglourious Basterds, Custody) hoisting a fur over his loins as he flounces out of the room could be accused of accidental kitsch. And if that sounds appealing, prepare to be thrilled by every nanosecond of Stéfan Crépon’s prim, high-waisted performance as the very Hegelian help.
Ménochet stars as the film-maker of the title, a hard-drinking, coke-snorting West German auteur who is revered by Cannes, the cinematic community and Karl (Crépon). Between dictating his next magnum opus and adoring letters to Romy Schneider, Peter is visited by his sometime muse, Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani), and the married, promiscuous Amir (Khalil Ben Gharbia), the twink who ultimately inspires and destroys the obsessed director.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was simultaneously a tribute to the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk and an autobiographical account of Fassbinder’s torrid affair with Günther Kaufmann. Fans of the great German director will note that Amir is named for El Hedi ben Salem, the Moroccan star of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, who, for three years, embarked on an even more torrid affair with the director. Peter’s latest film, meanwhile, shares its plot with Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun. Bitter Tears star Hanna Schygulla pops up as Peter’s mother.
Petra von Kant is a remarkable thing that has inspired a 2005 opera (commissioned by RTÉ and English National Opera), the fun 2018 German comedy Casting, Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria and Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy.
Ozon’s translation is a playful addition to the canon. It may lack the bitterness that Fassbinder skilfully worked into his film and its title, but it compensates with unmissable glass-throwing, door-slamming romantic agony. Every performance is overwrought and magnificent. Furniture is literally and figuratively decimated.
It is just as well that the film is set during the 1970s, as Isabelle Adjani has apparently not aged a day since.
Peter von Kant is released digitally on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, December 23rd, and in cinemas on Friday, December 30th
