Peter von Kant,
dir. François Ozon, 2022, France, 85m., in French with full English subtitles
👎🙄🥱
Sunday, June 26, 2022, 7:00pm Castro
Fifty years ago, German playwright/filmmaker Werner Rainer Fassbinder
made Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), a miserable and pretentious film about miserable and pretentious
characters doing miserable and pretentious things. Then French filmmaker
François Ozon decided he wanted a piece of that miserable and pretentious
action for himself, so he reimagined miserable and pretentious Petra von
Kant as the perhaps even more miserable and pretentious Peter von Kant,
moved the setting of the film from Bremen to Köln for no apparent reason,
and made his own miserable and pretentious film.
You may have guessed by this point that I am a fan of neither Fassbinder
nor Ozon. Fassbinder’s 1982 Querelle, the last film he directed, is
considered by some to be a classic of queer cinema, but I saw it as a bad
B-movie with cheesy costumes. One of Ozon’s first features was
Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes (Water Drops on Burning Rocks), based on the unproduced Fassbinder play
Tropfen auf heiße Steine. In my lexicon, it would be better
titled Acid Drops on Burning Eyeballs. The previous year, Ozon
made Les amants criminels (Criminal Lovers), which I also
reviled. So clearly I came into Peter von Kant not expecting
much, but Ozon undercut even those low expectations.
Khalil Ben Gharbia as Amir Ben Salem, the ingénu, taking the place of
Karin in the original, was certainly beautiful and played his part well.
Stefan Crepon as Karl, von Kant’s silently suffering assistant, managed to
convey volumes simply by his facial expressions, cleverly framed in
strategically placed mirrors. But Denis Ménochet as Peter von Kant lacked
the presence of Margit Car(s)tensen’s Petra, and the story was lacking in
authenticity and interest. Petra at least followed an arc, moving from
wanting to possess Karin to being possessed by her; Peter just kind of
leaps from one to the other. Fassbinder fans will delight in seeing Hanna
Schygulla (Karin, the ingénue) as von Kant’s mother, but for anyone but a
diehard devotee of Fassbinder and Ozon, I give this one an emphatically
heartfelt NOT RECOMMENDED.
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