We must think of Carlo Chatrian as a true humanist. He said that the opening film of his first real Berlinale, that is, a Berlinale in real cinemas in front of real people, should bring lightness and momentum into our dull everyday life.
We were very happy regarding that. Everyday life is in fact cloudy like the February sky over any real Berlinale. And it is particularly cloudy during the day at Potsdamer Platz.
It’s now such a gloomy non-place that, as soon as you get off the train, bus or taxi, you start fantasizing regarding the next lockdown and want to get in somewhere. But you can’t get in anywhere because there’s nothing left. You can only go to the cinema. The fact that it should then be light and lively in it is therefore a deeply philanthropic announcement.
The opening film is called “Peter von Kant”. François Ozon filmed it. And those who have made it into Chatrian’s realm of verve and lightness end up in the inner world of cinema history – Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s department.
In an area that is not necessarily associated with momentum and lightness. At least not as a German. The French are different. The Fassbinder love lighter and more swinging.
Ozon, a declared lover of Fassbinder, has his melodrama “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” performed. In 1972, the cinema version of Fassbinder’s play, which is still the most frequently performed, premiered at the Berlinale.
Denis Ménochet as famous film director and Fassbinder alter-ego Peter von Kant
Which: C. Bethuel / FOZ
From the mid-twenties in an airy apartment in Worpswede within ten days for 325,000 without male figures, but shot with almost all of his muses Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Eva Mattes and Hanna Schygulla.
Ozone calls what he did with Fassbinder’s human laboratory experiment a reinterpretation. And anyone who has previously gone into the studio of the famous fashion designer Petra von Kant, which is full of dolls, will find quite a lot on every corner of the Cologne home office of Ozon’s famous film director Peter von Kant.
The dolls (blood red instead of creamy white), the records, the Braun record player, the white flokati, all the toys from the early seventies, the machine gun-like typing on the typewriter.
Even the mega-symbolic Poussin painting of King Midas, for whom everything he loves and desires turns to gold and ultimately perishes, hangs there – this time modestly framed and not oversized as a gigantic photo wallpaper. Gigantic (and new) are the highly symbolic, lascivious paintings of Saint Sebastian tormented by arrows.
Ozone didn’t bring the story to us, mostly literally, from his time. It’s 1972, the cars are still beautiful (in contrast to Fassbinder’s hermetic film, there is a hint of the outside world in Ozone), and Romy Schneider is still alive.
Must own what you want to love
Ozon has taken it over completely, this artist legend full of kitsch and artificiality and the precocious life philosophy of a 25-year-old young genius. The drama of a woman who humiliates, destroys what she loves. Who must own where she wants to love. And who is then humiliated, destroyed in a crazy relationship with a girl who protects her and thus makes her dependent.
People need each other, that’s what Kant’s Passion Festival revolves around, but they haven’t learned how to live it, closeness, love. It’s regarding the dream of pure love, regarding what the system, society makes of it, what happens when feelings and business mix, dependencies arise.
Ozon uses as a doorway to his cinematic arthouse, which Margit Christensen used to play the role of Petra von Kant, which was alien to her. At some point she realized that Petra is none other than Rainer Werner. Then it worked.
Ozon transforms the theatrically revved-up text (which Ozon revs up only occasionally and calculatedly) into the only thing that can probably still be done fifty years from now. It serves him as a stage for a homage to German cinema and fine satirical dances on Germanness. Above all, however, as a basis for a Fassbinder biopic, in which the wound edges of the artistic work and love process can be viewed as if through an aesthetic MeToo high-performance microscope.
Monster, Lover, Human
In the story of Peter and Amir, the boy who came to Germany from the Maghreb via Australia and whom Peter loves and encourages, Ozon tells the story of Fassbinder and Günther Kaufmann.
How Denis Ménochet transforms himself into a monstrous and weepy, fragile-powerful, coking, gin with and without tonic drinker from Kant Fassbinder, with what elemental force and relentlessness, is alone worth an escape to this very special interior. Everything revolves around him. He is the woeful center of this world.
Denis Ménochet as Peter von Kant and Isabelle Adjani as his muse Sidonie in François Ozon’s “Peter von Kant”
Which: C. Bethuel/FOZ
“Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves” is the cantus firmus of Ozon’s multi-act opera. Jeanne Moreau sang the song in Fassbinder’s last film Querelle. You hear it for the first time while Peter von Kant is examining himself very closely in the mirror, so closely that you think he’s kissing what he sees.
At the end, Hanna Schygulla, as Kant’s mother, sings “Schlaf, Kindlein, Schlaf” to Rainer Werner von Kant, who collapsed in tears. That doesn’t help.
Afterwards you stand at Potsdamer Platz. It’s not that easy. The momentum is moderate. But you don’t want to go back, either. Thank you Carlo Chatrian.