By Peter Keough

Inevitably, by recasting Petra von Kant as a as version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder himself, François Ozon has rendered the film self-consciously cinematic.

Peter von Kant, directed François Ozon. Screening at the Kendall Square Cinema.

Denis Ménochet in a scene from Peter von Kant.

When Rainer Werner Fassbinder died in 1982 at his home in Munich after a solitary night of booze, cocaine, and barbiturates he had made nearly 50 feature films and television shows over the course of 13 years. He had been working on the screenplay of another film, Rosa L, based on the life of German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg who had been murdered by the proto-Nazi Freikorps. His films had defined an epic in German and world cinema and included such masterworks as Love Is Colder than Death (1969), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978), and the 14-episode TV adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980).

Though not as prolific or self-destructive as Fassbinder, the 54-year-old François Ozon boasts a decent 20 or so features to his credit. His most recent, Peter von Kant, is a gender-swapping remake of Fassbinder’s quasi-autobiographical The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). As far as I know it is, with the possible exception of Ozon’s own 2000 adaptation of Fassbinder’s 1966 play Water Drops on Burning Rocks, the only Fassbinder remake to date.

In the original The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, which was initially also a play before Fassbinder brought it to the screen, the title fashion designer is in bed languishing from ennui, heartbreak, and regular doses of gin and champagne until her friend Sidonie (Katrin Schaake) drops by with her new acquaintance Karin (Hanna Schygulla). A seeming naïf with a tragic upbringing, Karin proves a quick study, responding with a coy responsiveness to Petra’s overtures. When Petra suggests she drop by later and discuss working for her as a model she turns the older woman’s infatuation to her advantage. In the course of four acts divided by fades to black Karin has exploited Petra for money and success, broken her heart, and left her bereft and bitter and alone — much as she was before they met.

In his remake Ozon has recast Petra as a version of Fassbinder himself, a middle-aged, sybaritic cinema genius with a taste for excess and morbid romantic obsessiveness. Played by the robust and corpulent Denis Ménochet, this von Kant, unlike Margit Carstensen’s languid, Klimtian Petra, exudes as much animal vitality as he does baby-man pitifulness.

His predatory nature awakens when Sidonie – her role expanded here into a faded movie star, pop singer, and Peter’s former muse and lover and played by Isabelle Adjani in Joan Collins mode — introduces him to Amir (Khalil Gharbia), the working class, baby-faced boy version of Schygulla’s blue collar, kewpie doll Karin. Peter exerts his macho professional power, dragging Amir into a screen test during which the boy confesses the sordid fate of his parents. Before our eyes Peter transforms Amir from a human being into an image, a reverse of the Pygmalion process. But Amir is no victim; like Karin, he proves tougher than he looks, recognizing the power his transformation has given him and turning it to his advantage.

Inevitably, by recasting von Kant as a Fassbinder stand-in, Ozon also renders the film more cinematic, if self-consciously so. Fassbinder, in his adaptation from his own play, heightened the claustrophobic staginess until its brittle stasis became in itself cinematic. His film is totally insulated by artifice, with Petra surrounded by mannequins, toys, record albums, and magazines in a space dominated by a giant, gaudy reproduction of Nicolas Poussin’s “Midas et Bacchus.”

But Ozon lets in a little air, starting with the opening scene with a shot taken from outside Peter’s apartment as his mute, masochistic assistant Karl – a delicate, bird-like little man (Stefan Crépon) as opposed to Petra’s ominous Morticia Addams-like Marlene (Irm Hermann) – opens the shutters. The camera then wanders about the set — not languidly as in the original but hungrily, with Ozon piling on the kitsch that Fassbinder only touched on. He sees Fassbinder’s Poussin and raises him not one but three Saint Sebastians – reproductions of versions by Caracciolo, Rubens, and Toscano, topped off in the last act by a bunch of big black-and-white shots of Amir scantily clad and bristling with arrows.

Ozon also opens up the film to the world of cinema – Fassbinder’s specifically, with numerous allusions to his films. When Amir first arrives he tells Peter he is staying at the Hotel Döblin, recalling the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Later, after Amir has hit the big time and hit the road, Peter has hung a poster of his protégé starring in a film titled “Liebe ist heißer als der Tod” (“Love Is Hotter Than Death”). Early in his downfall Peter plays a recording of Adjani’s Sidonie performing “Jeder tötet was er liebt (Each Man Kills the Things He Loves),” a song whose lyrics (by Oscar Wilde) had originally been sung by Jeanne Moreau in Fassbinder’s last film Querelle (1982). And in one of the film’s most affecting moments Schygulla — here in the role of Peter’s mother (her previous role was as a woman who performs euthanasia in Ozon’s 2021 film Everything Went Well) — sings him the traditional lullaby “Schlaf, Kindlein, Schlaf (Sleep Baby Sleep),” evoking her role as the chanteuse in Fassbinder’s Lili Marlene (1981).

In the end, Ozon injects warmth, energy, and pathos into Fassbinder’s film. But does his remake amount to more than an earnest, sometimes giddy (a shot of Karl popping a champagne cork as Peter and Amir get it on, for example, is an odd tonal choice) homage? Perhaps he is undergoing a cinematic version of the process the literary critic Harold Bloom describes in his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry in which the artist must confront and overcome the domination of the artist who has inspired him. In the same way Fassbinder himself had to grapple with the director who inspired him, Douglas Sirk, in his own films — beginning with Petra von Kant.

So far Ozon seems to have made the better adjustment. In the final scene of the film he sentences his cinematic daimon to a hell of his own making, sealed in a room cursing and beseeching the figment of his love he has created as it flickers on a screen.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).