Quentin Tarantino he admits it without nonsense: “I saw it in the cinema and I barely made it to the credits.” Talk about ‘The bitter tears of Petra von Kant‘, one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films that he was unable to see in its entirety (along with ‘Lili Marleen’, which he found disappointing). Of all the German’s work, forty-four films between 1969 and his death in 1982, he says he has seen only four. You can recover it in Filmin in a remastered version, and in Movistar Plus.
‘Petra von Kant’ is precisely the most cited chamber piece of all Fassbinder’s films, shot entirely inside the attic of a fashion designer who falls in love with a model much younger than her and loses control over her own feelings. Margit Carstensen plays Petra with a theatricality that earned her several awards of the time, in an oppressive environment and reinforced by avant-garde costumes and spectacular photography by Michael Ballhaus.
What distinguishes the film is the distance it imposes between the melodrama and the viewer: dialogues recited with a total absence of naturalism, colors saturated to the point of artifice, and a choreography of bodies that leaves aside all traces of spontaneity. Directors like Olivier Assayas and Abel Ferrara count it among their favorite filmsbut Tarantino got stuck with its eminently European style and the claustrophobic tone that doesn’t leave the attic.
In any case, let no one be scared: this is not the first time that Tarantino has choked on an apparently revered film: he already admitted that it took him three tries to get hooked on ‘Dunkirk’, the Christopher Nolan film that ended up becoming the one he defends most passionately. It’s what cinema has that works as an assault on the senses: it doesn’t necessarily have to be easy to enter.
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