PETER VON KANT
Type: melodrama with tragedy
Director: Francois Ozon. With Denis Ménochet, Khalil Ben Gharbia, Isabelle Adjani, Stefan Crepon, Hanna Schigulla, Aminthe Audiard
Male rereading of The bitter tears by Petra von Kant by Fassbinder. In the 1972 film Petra was a fashion designer who fell in love with an ambitious young woman here Peter is a director who is bewitched by a young man whose ambition is immediately understood.
Same Seventies setting in a single large interior (originally there is a piece that later became a film), the same disquieting presence of a secretary-servant and same path that transforms the bond between two people into a cruel tug of warwhose final act will also be attended by the mother (Hanna Schygulla, who was the ambitious young woman in the 1972 film).
Isabelle Adjani and Hanna Schigulla in “Peter von Kant” (photo © Carole Bethuel / Foz).
But above all there is the same reflection on the power game that takes possession of people through feelings and which inevitably ends up ending with a winner and a victim.
It was a theme that Ozon had already addressed in his previous reduction by Fassbinder, Drops of water on hot stonesbut which here takes on the strength of a real theorem, inexorable and glacial, on the sufferings of love (the images of San Sebastiano that litter the house are no coincidence) and which only at the end seems to dissolve into a bit of emotion for who is defeated.
For those who want to confront the (lethal) power of feelings.
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