Berlin Review: François Ozon’s Festival Opener ‘Peter Von Kant’
deadline.comIt’s a neat conceit, making the directing colossus of 1970s German cinema into the star of his own show. Peter Von Kant, the opening film of the Berlin Film Festival, is “freely adapted” by French director François Ozon from The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s highly stylized 1972 story of three women locked in a toxic triangle of love, jealousy, domination and submission.
The storyline and much of the dialogue, is the same; where Ozon shakes it up is by making the trio all men. Ozon has tangled with Fassbinder before.
His 2000 film, Water Drops On Burning Rocks, which also dealt with power struggles within sexual relationships, was adapted from a Fassbinder play.
Taking on The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, a recognized landmark of European cinema, is a bolder move, made at a different moment in Ozon’s career.
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