Distributor: The Criterion Collection
Release Date: January 13, 2015
MSRP: $39.99
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Film: A / Video: A / Audio: B+ / Extras: B-

We meet fashion designer Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) when her live-in partner/S&M sub Marlene (Irm Hermann) returns to their flat and throws open the curtains in the woman’s bedroom. Petra’s arms immediately fly up, clawlike, to shield her face from the rays like a vampire, the first of a series of transformations and personae Carstensen adopts in the first few minutes. Rising from bed and bossing around Marlene with magisterial poise, Petra turns into an Old Hollywood diva. Once she sits up in her white nightgown and calls her mother to make simple, giddy chit-chat about the latter’s upcoming trip abroad, Petra even takes on an air of progerial innocence, a precocious child who awoke this morning from a long slumber and does not yet know that she is now in her 40s. All of this occurs before she even bothers to dress and put on a wig, the literal display of adaptability paling in comparison to the performance.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the prolific queer filmmaker who racked up more than 40 films, TV movies, and shorts in a 16-year career, specialized in movies whose production design and careful composition belied their low-budget, time-crunched shoots. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, one of only two films he made in 1972, is perhaps the quintessential display of the director’s ability to wring cinema from conditions that would make live theater look cramped. The action is confined almost exclusively to Petra’s bedroom, yet both the narrative and aesthetic are in a state of constant flux.

Though Petra never leaves her apartment, various people come to her. Marlene dominates the first few minutes as she does all the work around the place, but when Petra receives visitors, she disappears into the deep recesses of the frame, an automaton who waits on her mistress and guests. Petra’s cousin, Sidonie (Katrin Schaake), comes to announce her engagement, prompting a lengthy monologue from Petra about how she came to loathe men, her talk not so much a philosophical discourse as a rhetorical hostage taking that subdues Sidonie’s joy for the purpose of airing grievances. But the film truly kicks off when Sidonie mentions a friend, Karin (Hanna Schygulla), and the woman seems to suddenly appear in the apartment with the help of a sudden cut. Karin’s entrance into Petra’s world immediately throws off the older woman’s sense of power by leaving her stricken with affection.

The rest of the film charts Petra’s emotional journey through a careful modulation of the frame. Near the beginning, the light is put through bronze filters that gives Petra’s dominating presence a classical edge, subtly aligning her sexual power with the gigantic, erotic Baroque painting that fills one of the walls of her room. Even when Petra does not face the camera, a well-placed mirror shines her reflection back at the lens, ensuring that we never forget the star of this woman’s four-walled world. When a sudden time jump places Petra deep into a one-sided relationship with Karin, however, the warm glow is replaced by a brittle, white shine that casts a clinical light on Petra, who now seems more like a flighty teenager in a bad romance than a reclusive queen. Even the flat’s walls seem less furnished, with gaps of white brick exposed in lieu of the rocco décor in the first act. Finally, in Karin’s absence, the camera adopts an Ozu-like position on the bedroom’s shag floor, which now looks fully like a room in a psychedelic sanitarium as the women in Petra’s life congregate around the woman, clothed in a verdant dress and hovering over the telephone hoping her love will call, as if to perform last rites.

One constant of the film’s aesthetic arc is that the camera pulls farther away from Carstensen the deeper the actress sinks into her character’s malaise. Petra enters the frame ready for her close-up, but as the woman starts to crack from her unrequited love, the camera steps back a pace to take in the gulfs of physical and emotional space between the protagonist and Karin; where an earlier two-shot so crushed the depth between the pair that Karin’s shoulder seemed to meld with Petra’s chest, now they seem apart even when touching. In the final stretch, Petra’s total breakdown is filmed from what appears the be the longest possible distance without allowing the camera to leave the room, as if it desperately wants to escape but is caught in Petra’s emotional eddy. But that would be letting everyone, including the audience, off easy, and though Fassbinder trod similar thematic terrain for the rest of his career, he rarely matched the suffocating, wrenching agony attained here.

A/V

One expects great quality from Criterion’s transfers, but the company nonetheless continues to impress with their presentation of increasingly sophisticated restorations. Fassbinder has a few films in Criterion’s hi-def library, but none half so startlingly rendered as this. The lighting of Petra’s apartment is so crisp that you can make out strands of hair on each haloed head, while the deeply chromatic mise-en-scène is given maximum symbolic and intuitive impact for the richness of color brought back to the film. Black levels are faultless, and flesh tones are natural, or at least as natural as flesh ever looks in Fassbinder’s work. Audio is well-balanced and a bit soft, perfect for the cramped, slow-burn nature of the movie. The occasional burst of song, however, becomes that much more startling for the abrupt crescendo of the track

Extras

A handful of new interviews fills most of the disc’s extras, including contributions from the film’s actors and a brief remembrance from cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. The disc also includes an extended discussion by Emerson College professor Jane Shattuc, who approaches the film from a more analytical perspective, while a 1992 German TV documentary entitled “Role Play” interviews some of Fassbinder’s actresses, including the stars of Bitter Tears about their work with the director.

Overall

Criterion brings one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s greatest films to Blu-ray with an exceptional transfer that highlights how ornate the director could make even the most limited resources look.