The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

The characters and relationships are interesting but the compositions framed up by Fassbinder are colossal. There is so much you can read into the way each shot is lined up. The colour palette of the film is another striking element of the visual design and probably contains enough meaning to keep 10 film PhD students writing for a year. While the film is glorious to look at, what's more amazing is that not much happens and yet it isn't tedious to sit through!

It saves a long walk to the theater, and the show you're about to witness or already did is slowly accelerating your blood through your brain and into your subconscious. The images are delightful, the acting is cruel as it is cold and every shot is aimed at your heart. The atmosphere is admirable and nothing compares to the last despaired breath this cinematic miracle draws before it shrivels back into normality. -2012

This film is soooooo intense.

Compelling character study of a villainous fashion designer's fall from grace, the apartment setting and use of silences gives an unbearable, claustrophobic tension to the hysteric proceedings. On a superficial level, the costumes and gaudy aesthetics are incredible.

A cinematic stage play. Every character lived in and passionately performed. Fassbinder orchestrates them with wisdom and ease, knowing when to use the camera as a pen or as a tool to observe and empathize with the presented human beings. The film may have PVK's name in its title, but I will never forget Marlene.

Bergman's CRIES and Fassbinder's TEARS, both from 1972: the latter seems the work of someone who has studied Bergman closely...and learned nothing. The result is a concoction of female neurosis, symbolic camerawork and framing, and very bad melodrama. But ARE these characters really female? I'm less than convinced that Fassbinder is much of an authority on female psychology, in which case perhaps this is better understood as a film in which actresses have been asked to play male roles...in drag.

There's no way this story could have been more perfectly executed. Gorgeous, compelling... Watch it.

In a way, a master-slave picture that shows the lengths lonely people are willing to go in order to control others for their own benefit. You can feel that Fassbinder has a kind of contempt for melodramatic romance and heartbreak, yet he also takes it very seriously. He mocks the humans he writes about, in this case a self-indulgent fashion designer, yet when things become dark, there's no question as to whether or not we're affected. Unique. Fassbinder is a talented director.

Among blisteringly raw emotions, a scathing script and deeply drawn characters, the most captivating thing is the aesthetics of it all. It's adapted from a play, but it's so intensely filmic: beautiful compositions pointedly express everything via simple visual metaphors, characters practically dance around each other showing the ever shifting positions of power, and then those extraordinary shots where Marlene turns her head in the background and immediately our attention is solely on her gaze.

Despite it's theatrical restraints, this film still manages to entice it's viewer in a gently filmic fashion, portraying love as the complex, delicate, and insane issue it is. Not the most comfortable film to sit through, which makes it all the more fun.

Excellent. Theatrical and intense and intelligent and weird and very aesthetically pleasing.

Two hours of a stylish existential morality play set in a single room with vain women discussing love and ambition. There's so many ways this could have been boring and stupid, and it kind of was, but it was also absolutely amazing and riveting. I was a little bored at times but now that it's over I kind of want to watch it again.

The kind of movie that doesn't engage, but rather absorbs you with it's atmosphere. It's not a film for everyone though, its slow, ponderous, incredibly subtle, and the blocking is so strange that the character interactions are nothing more than expressions. It's the depth of these expressions, and it's beautiful execution that makes for a highly satisfying experience. It's not the kind of film I'd watch again, but I'm sure it would be even more rewarding on a second viewing.

In synopsis, the story sounds lame. Fassbinder gets it to work. Please trust me on this.

A work of immense emotional intelligence and aesthetic brilliance. I suppose it's not for everyone, though. It features six women and no men, and doesn't do much to cover up the fact that it's adapted from a play - it looks and feels like one.

This is essentially filmed theatre, but all the players are experts. Carstensen does a phenomenal job playing a complicated lead, and Schygulla is mesmerising.

I plan to revisit this at some point perhaps--I suspect it might have just caught me in the wrong mood. The acting is good, but it just bored me until the last half hour or so.

made me think of buddy maxcoombes' depressed observation about martha that "where other great directors open doors, fassbinder seems only to close them". it's true, but it's simply a matter of honesty, no? i'm not sure we've opened as many doors as we'd like to tell ourselves since 1945 (or sirk), and there remains a lot to learn about the macro from watching the same old atrocities play out--with such immaculate precision and aggressive bluntness--in sealed off apartments and bedrooms.

No, this isn't "filmed theatre." While obviously the actresses carry a lot of weight here, so much here is done by the camera - we're not supposed to be watching this, it's too personal, too toxic, yet Fassbinder locks us in this room. Incredibly intense.

Viewed March 12, 2022. Fassbinder's inventive staging of this space tells us as much as any of the dialogue; it's airless and claustrophobic, but the ornate mural and the ringing telephone and the blinding sun shining through the windows all suggest the possibility of life outside of this world and its toxic antecedents. And yet, no one ever leaves.

I’m pretty sure at this point that any film that has a genuine melancholic soul is bound to be great. / “I think people need each other, they're made that way. But they haven't learnt how to live together.” “I’m not hysterical, I’m suffering”.

:(

Well directed and acted, but way too static with uninteresting dialogues and monologues by annoying characters. It has its moments; like the incredible ending.

Very surprising movie.

More pretentious and less engrossing than any other Fassbinder film I've seen. I did appreciate that not a single male actor appears on screen for the entire thing, but wish he was better able to absorb me into these particular female characters. In a strange way, I would say this is Fassbinder's Desperate Living, though maybe just because its a lesbian movie made by a gay man.

85 kere durdurup devam ederek izlememe rağmen çok etkileyiciydi. keşke farklı bi zamanda tanısaydım seni ama yine de güzeldi.

Camerawork so deliberate, intense and dramatic that it's just about to fall into parody. And that's the best thing here. You'll be forgiven for thinking this is imitating/mocking Bergman.

kahrolsun ask yasasin is as cintonik

(Rewatch) OK yeah i definitely understand why i wasn't crazy about this the first time, it's very unabashedly stagey and basically consists of long theatrical monologues, almost like Fassbinder doing a Bergman thing (but better, and more interestingly shot, by Ballhaus of course). I can at least appreciate it for what it is now, and parts are even pretty great (the Walker Brothers song!) It's probably best, and most interesting, to read it as gender-swapped autobiography on Fassbinder's part.

I found this story very boring and stagy and could not sit it through.

Takes the form of a stage play put seems more like an essay because this is such an academic work. You have to know something about feminist theory to figure out what exactly Fassbinder is critiquing and why this film is (wrongly in my mind) controversial.

#543

By the end of this Fassbinder film it does get very interesting with its titular character and fascinating. Sadly however, the first half drags horrifically.

"Not exactly the most comfortable film of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's career." - Ed Gonzalez

519

Master-slave dialectic put on film, with some really unsympathetic characters to back it up. Too bad it's not very engaging, although the Marlene character opens up for some interesting metaphoric interpretations. The talent of Fassbinder is evident, but I admit it took some iron will to sit this one through.

A theatrical, meticulous movie. But not my kind of stuff, unfortunately.

503

Great

emotional violence

# 557

I was very bored and yet very intrigued at the same time.