By Jim Gilles
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/12/22 – One of the much-awaited films included in Outfest 2022 is François Ozon’s Peter von Kant (France, 2022), a tale about romantic obsession built on the framework of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 masterpiece The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. It will screen at the Directors Guild of America as part of Outfest on Sunday, July 17, at 9:30 PM. Ozon’s film opened this year’s Berlin Film Festival and this will be its Los Angeles premiere. Ozon has removed the “bitter tears” from the title and also from the film, rendering the basic story more genial, campy and comic than Fassbinder’s tense ordeal. The female fashionista of Petra (played by Margit Carlson) has been made into a hunking male movie director, Peter von Kant, boisterously played by Denis Ménochet, and modeled clearly on aspects of Fassbinder’s own personality. For tickets, go to: https://www.outfestla.org/films-and-events.
Fassbinder’s film was set entirely in the apartment of Petra von Kant, a female fashion designer, who had an emotionally abusive relationship with her live-in assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann), and then conceives a mad and despairing love for a beautiful young woman Karin (Hanna Schygulla) who openly cheats on her. Ozon makes some of these characters men, but only some of them. Peter von Kant has a deadpan houseboy called Karl (Stefan Crepon) who hilariously is the intimate witness to all the passionate confrontations between Peter and his new lover Amir.
Petra’s bitchy female character from the first film is Sidonie, here played brilliantly by Isabelle Adjani. There is also Peter’s teenage daughter Valerie, home from boarding school, played by Aminthe Audiard. Peter’s beautiful, duplicitous male lover is Amir, played by Khalil Ben Gharbia. In the mix is also famous actress Hanna Schygulla, who played the lover Karin in Fassbinder’s 1972 version; she has been brought back to played Peter’s mother. The dynamics are definitely different now that there are both men and women on the screen: it is less airless and crazed, although just as theatrical and artificial. Ozon often gives his characters stagey entrances by framing them self-consciously in a doorway.
Peter von Kant (Denis Ménochet) is a revered film director who receives a visit from his eternal muse, Sidonie (Isabella Adjani), a woman whose star power brought him to fame. She seems to have had a reversal of fortune and is hungry to act in his next project, an outline in which he intends to feature Romy Schneider. Along with Sidonie is a new toy she’s discovered on her travels, the handsome Amir Ben Salem (Khalil Garbia), with whom Peter is instantly smitten. Reeling from a recent break-up, Peter sinks his teeth into Amir, casting him in his film as a way to coerce the younger man into being his new love interest. However, Peter’s obsessive love and unyielding lust strangles their relationship.
Perhaps the most fantastic addition here by Ozon is the exquisite Isabelle Adjani, playing a famed actor/chanteuse named Sidonie, who has a toxic relationship to Peter von Kant. She is a porcelain goddess more manipulative than she seems. Early on, Peter puts on a Sidonie record where she croons “Each man kills the thing he loves,” while he gazes at himself in the mirror. This is a nod to Jeanne Moreau in Fassbinder’s swan song Querelle, but also a masterful, metatextual foreboding. It’s Adjani’s actual voice on the track, and recalls Ozon’s early short A Summer Dress (1996), which utilizes the tangible artifacts of a bygone era Ozon clearly loves. Peter even deigns to describe his relationship to Sidonie as being in love with the actress and not the woman.
Ozon’s chief coup is making Peter a film director, meaning Peter can give Amir a screen test then and there in his apartment, during which he asks Amin about his parents’ tragic death as the camera is rolling and responds with the intensity – part sadistic, part empathetic – of the killer in Peeping Tom. Throughout it all, the real scene stealer is Stefan Crepon in the maid/Irm Hermann role as Karl, a supplicant to von Kant’s demi-god tendencies, while Ozon tacks on an adolescent daughter (Aminthe Audiard) for an extra dollop of dysfunction.
It’s a lusty autumn in 1972 Cologne, but turns quickly to a winter of discontent as Peter’s relationship with Amir sours. Ozon brilliantly aligns Amir’s fall with Saint Sebastian, the melancholic and oft-coded imagery for queer subtexts. Somehow, against its excessively loquacious odds, we come to feel for the morosely selfish Peter, who like his female alter ego Petra, is searching, quite hungrily, for an impossible kind of love.
In Ozon’s Peter von Kant, we end up with a chamber drama where the debauched dialogues and sexual tension seem omnipresent. Raging out of control much of time, Ménochet as Peter von Kant delivers a temper-overloaded performance in this uber-queer retro feast that is a curious homage to Fassbinder, the passionate artist whose hedonism changed cinema but ruined his own life.