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 who has an emotionally abusive relationship with her live-in assistant, and then conceives a mad and despairing love for a beautiful young woman who openly cheats on her. Ozon makes some of these characters men, but only some of them. We have to hope he doesn’t get the kind of grief that Paul Feig got for his all-female Ghostbusters, from Fassbinder fans claiming he has trashed their childhoods.
