Peter von Kant review – limp redo of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder classic

Behind Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, one of the legendary German director’s many masterpieces, lies an excoriating sense of self-hatred that drives the film’s psychosexual forward motion. Fassbinder’s view of human relationships was bleak, nihilistic and obsessive, and in his best films he placed his singular obsessions front and centre, cutting out every ounce of his own deeply flawed sense of self for us to see. Why François Ozon – nobody’s favourite filmmaker – thought he was up to a gender-swapped remake of such a deeply personal work is beyond me.

Ozon plays Peter von Kant somewhere between a fiction and a biopic. We follow the titular character, played by Denis Ménochet, an obvious stand-in for Fassbinder who, in the aftermath of one failed love affair, is immediately introduced to the dashing Amir (Khalil Ben Gharbia), thereafter following their own tumultuous, tragic affair. Amir clearly represents El Hedi ben Salem, the star of Fear Eats the Soul and one of Fassbinder’s many lovers; the two had a tempestuous and difficult relationship. A few years after it ended, Salem killed himself in prison in 1977.

In Ozon’s retelling, however, the complexity of the relationship between Fassbinder and Salem is reduced to something two-dimensional. Amir becomes a model-beautiful sex toy who plays with Peter’s feelings and leaves him heartbroken – in flattening Salem/Amir, though, Ozon does an injustice to the inherent melodrama within the text and the ugly complexity of the real-life relationship. Peter’s relationship with Amir is the entire dramatic crux of the film, and yet it has no emotional power whatsoever, no sense of blood and guts.

Despite the fact that Ozon is perfectly entitled to take liberties with the facts, Peter von Kant struggles. The actors – even ones as brilliant as Isabelle Adjani, who plays a vain former muse of Peter’s, and a brief cameo from Hanna Schygulla as Peter’s mother – are asked to shout their feelings at each, which they approach with commitment but little purpose. Ménochet, however, does a great job of capturing Fassbinder’s selfishness, arrogance, neediness, and egotism, as well as the charisma, sexuality and smarts that simultaneously made him so seductive. His mute assistant Karl (Stefan Crepon) serves as an amusing audience surrogate, fussing between repulsion and devotion. Ozon’s framing at least allows these performances a bit of space in which to exist in a stage-bound, single setting.

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of distance from the source material. Autobiography as marshalled by someone other than its original author can bring clarity and a sense of relevancy – new themes and ideas teased out from their first iterations, like a friend who's able understand us better than we know ourselves. Ozon, however, doesn’t come across as if he knows Fassbinder at all. The result is a screamy, shouty film which reveals nothing about the source material. You're better off simply revisiting the original.

Peter von Kant was screened as part of Berlinale Film Festival 2022. It it released in UK cinemas on 30 December.