A Room of Their Own: Thoughts on the film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant  

by David Fellerath

"I would like to build a house with my films," Rainer Werner Fassbinder once noted. "Some are the cellar, others the walls, still others the windows. But I hope in the end it will be a house."

Fassbinder made 43 films and wrote a handful of plays before he died in 1982 at the age of 38. If his house had 43 rooms, then The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was the stifling, airless and perfumed boudoir.

PVK began its life as a play, which Fassbinder produced in 1971 with his theater company and which he dedicated to Margit Carstensen, who would play Petra in both stage and film versions. Over a period of ten days in January, 1972, Fassbinder, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and a cast of six commenced filming of PVK in an artists' colony in Bremen, West Germany. To put this shoot in context, over the preceding three calendar years, Fassbinder and his company had made 12 films, and at this point the films were only just starting to acquire a commercially pleasing technical polish.

Although Fassbinder's films were beginning to be noticed on the international film scene by this time, PVK was still very much the work of a scrappy little theater company. As is the case with underfunded stage productions, some of the parts were filled by actors who were the wrong ages for their parts. Margit Carstensen¹, at 31, was at least a decade younger than the middle-aged Petra. Gisela Fackeldey, who plays Valerie, Petra's mother, was a youthful 48, while Hanna Schygulla², at 28 years of age, was a few years too old (and, truthfully, a few pounds too heavy) for the role of Karin, the faithless young model. Such is the power of their performances, however, and the audacity of Fassbinder's conception, that it doesn't matter.

In its form--a chamber drama featuring a cast of women--PVK harkens back to Clare Booth Luce's The Women, 1950s Douglas Sirk melodramas such as Imitation of Life and All that Heaven Allows and, in a more modernist vein, the excoriating psychodramas that were coming from Sweden's Ingmar Bergman. Indeed, much commentary on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant tends to focus on its camp aspects (Women! Clothes! Catfights!), but Fassbinder's film has more than a little in common with those of Bergman, another taskmaster who inspired fear, reverence and submission in his actors.

In particular, PVK bears notable kinship with such Bergman efforts as The Silence, Persona and Cries and Whispers, films which featured different combinations of Bergman's most celebrated female performers: Harriet and Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann. In these films, as in PVK, women enact power struggles: the good (and repressed and lesbian) sister and the earthy, carnal one in The Silence, the vampiric mute actress and her naïve, increasingly resentful caretaker in Persona, and the emotionally, spiritually and sensually polarized three sisters of Cries and Whispers.

The central triangle of PVK is that of Petra, Karin and Marlene. Although the story is, notoriously, that of a power-mad and love-crazed fashion designer's passion for a young model, the story really has little to do with lesbianism in its literal sense. The choice of an all-female cast is an aesthetic one: It suits Fassbinder's interest in Sirkean melodrama, and the naked emotions on display are well-suited to female performers and the conventions of "women's pictures."

Instead, Fassbinder is concerned with the interplay between passion and power. As the metaphorical pants-wearing businesswoman and artist, Petra is in command of her haute couture shop, an enterprise that seems to depend on the uncomplaining toil of the mute Marlene. Petra has had romantic disappointments at the hands of men, but in Karin, she sees someone she can seduce and dominate by the sheer force of her power and personality. But, as she discovers, the heart trades in a different currency: Although Karin is ignorant and impecunious, it is she who has the power to break Petra's heart. As mighty as Petra is, she can't force Karin--or anyone else--to reciprocate her affections. In the end, Fassbinder's tale of a great woman's susceptibility to amour fou and catastrophic loneliness is part of a storied tradition that runs from Euripides' Medea to Marlowe's Edward II to Welles' Citizen Kane.

PVK was a great idea for a movie, but in truth, Fassbinder's film is a bit heavy on its feet, a result of the long takes he insisted on shooting, with the inevitably languorous line readings. So, watching it can be a bit of a chore--particularly in the first half hour or so, before the arrival of Karin. Fassbinder made a number of better films: Among them are Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975), Fox and His Friends (1975), In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and perhaps others.

Still, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant holds a special fascination, and a special place in Fassbinder's canon. It may not be the most comfortable room in Fassbinder's house, but it is one of the most boldly designed, bravely conceived and as such, one of the most unforgettable.

¹ Although Margit Carstensen has been overshadowed by the more glamorous Hanna Schygulla, she is a hard-working, gifted actress who played roles large and small in 16 films with Fassbinder. In addition to PVK, her most notable films with him include Martha (1974), Fear of Fear (1975), Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, The Third Generation (1979) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). She is a busy actress to this day, and she recently appeared in Crispin Hellion Glover's It is Fine. Everything is Fine! which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

² Hanna Schygulla was Fassbinder's first and most important artistic friendship. The two met in a Munich drama school in the mid-1960s. Fassbinder was there out of necessity--there was no place to study film, and he needed to begin a dramatic apprenticeship somewhere. Schygulla, on the other hand, was bored with her conventional course of study at university, and was looking to shake up her life (and irritate her parents). The two formed a fast friendship born of a mutual distaste for their poseur classmates and the benighted pedagogical methods at the school. According to Fassbinder's own essay, "Hanna Schygulla--Not a Star, Just a Vulnerable Human Being Like the Rest of Us," drama school was utter hell: "These Wednesday [improvisation classes] were demonstrations of the greatest desperation on the one hand and the most brutal sadism on the other. Rarely have I seen human beings behave so ruthlessly, so scornfully and contemptuously toward other human beings." Fassbinder goes on to write, immodestly, that "we were also considered the two most interesting and gifted people at the school--difficult people, to be sure, but endowed with the most promising, though perhaps abnormal, indeed rather alarming, talent." After a year together at school, the duo drifted apart for a couple of years--and Fassbinder confesses that he even forgot her name. However, he tracked her down in time for his first feature, Love is Colder than Death (1969), and their partnership was renewed. They made 20 films together, a collaboration that survived a period of estrangement in the mid-1970s before they reached their international apogee with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979).