The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972): First Impressions
Dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla
When I was in college, our German teacher held a series of Fassbinder film nights for her students to attend. I remember she showed The Marriage of Maria Braun, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, the latter of which was the only one I attended. I remember being struck by the claustrophobia of the film’s first act as the camera invades Emi’s small apartment and seems to push her and Ali together. I was also struck by how that claustrophobia gives way to an intense kenophobia after Emi and Ali come out with their relationship and Emi faces the social reproval of everyone in her life. Fassbinder’s film expertly showcasing the lingering effects of Nazism’s social norms in post-war West Germany. Fassbinder, I learned from those more familiar, was pessimistic and his staging was always meaningful.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is set entirely within the apartment of its titular figure, and predominantly within her makeshift bedroom/workspace, dominated by a wall-sized rendition of Nicolas Poussin’s “Midas and Bacchus.” This painting acts as a thematic throughline, as characters sometimes mimic the poses of figures in the painting, and various figures could be said to occupy the role of Dionysus or Midas throughout the course of the film.
Petra von Kant is a film about petty power politics, and the lies that some people tell themselves in order to craft the world they would prefer to occupy. Within her small apartment, Petra (Carstensen) is a royal figure brought low over the course of the film. She is a famous fashion designer who, at the start of the movie, seems to have risen to the heights of her industry. No longer needing to appear in the world, she instead holds court with friends and supplicants from the confines of her bedroom. The only regular occupants of which are two cats who we only see in the opening credits, and Marlene (Hermann), Petra’s mute servant who she seems to mistreat over the course of the movie. Petra is our Midas figure, and what at first appears to be her opulence is peeled away and rendered more as decadence as we see that she is not so much choosing to retreat from the world, as much as she is held captive by her need to manicure and pose her world and the people within it just so.
I’ve known a few Petras in my life. People who seem to radiate a kind of poise and command within their domain. People who have curated a personality and aesthetic that can appear so byzantine and arcane at first but that gives way to a kind of emptiness that has always made me wonder at the reason for such theatrics. I pity Petra, even as I recognize she’s essentially a narcissistic monster.
Our view of Petra is slowly broken down over the course of the film, as she takes in the young model Karin (Schygulla) as her live-in lover, only for us to discover in the next act that Petra really can’t control Karin, and has allowed herself to be made into a more embittered version of Marlene to this young model. Notably, this is also where we really begin to notice Petra’s skeletal figure. In the first act, Petra is adorned in a long robe. In the second, a kind of opulent jeweled outfit that binds but also adds a kind of lacy expansiveness to her arms. In the third act, when we see how Karin and Petra’s relationship has deteriorated, Petra wears a flesh-colored dress with a noticeable open back that reveals her shoulder blades and spine. We see that beneath her costumage, she is emaciated and looks much older than her age suggests (both the actress and the character are somewhere in their early 30s, while the makeup makes Petra look somewhere in her mid-late 40s).
On the subject of sadomasochism, we could look at Petra’s controlling personality. When Karin makes efforts to distance herself from Petra, Petra lashes out and demands Karin lie to her. Karin obliges and Petra is more than willing to buy into the lie, and is devastated when, again and again, she asks Karin if she means what she says and Karin says no. After Karin leaves, we meet Petra once more, now having removed the bed, her throne, from her room and leaving it bare but for the imposing painting, her plush carpet, and a phone where Petra sits, bottle of gin in hand, eagerly awaiting a call from Karin that will most likely never come. It’s Petra’s birthday, and we discover that she has moved her bed into the adjoining workspace and arranged several mannequins into a scene of lovemaking on the bed while she sits in her room. It’s easy to look at the scene Petra has constructed and view her as attempting to recreate her memories with Karin. However, I’m struck by the fact that there’s a third mannequin standing off to the side of the bed in this little diorama that’s been constructed. At first pass, I thought the third mannequin was intended to be Marlene, who acted as an unthanked handmaiden for both Petra and Karin while the latter lived in the apartment. However, I think it’s equally likely that the third mannequin standing off to the side of the two in bed is meant to represent Petra. A lot of Petra’s breakup with Karin centered around her jealousy over Karin’s non-commitment to her, and I think it’s possible that Petra is left stewing over the possibility that Karin is sleeping with other women. This is reinforced, for me, in the next scene where, having broken down, Petra finally receives a call from Karin, and is immediately pleased but also appears nonchalant, telling Karin that a meeting might be nice, but containing none of the fervor she had in the previous scene in her words.
However, the more obvious sadomasochistic element is, of course, Marlene. Marlene is something of a black box throughout the film. She’s constantly present, even if only in the background. Her longing expression is somewhat inscrutable as we are left to wonder whether what she feels toward Karin and Petra is a kind of jealousy, concern for Petra, or some other emotion. In each scene, Marlene is occupied with a major task that is intermittently interrupted by Petra’s demands for her. In the first scene, she is coloring in a sketch of a new outfit, in the second she is furiously typing away at some unknown writing, in the third she is adorning one of the mannequins with fabric, and in the fourth she primarily watches—having been bidden to fetch more alcohol but seemingly refusing in favor of just watching Petra and her guests from the door frame to the bedroom. It’s only in the final moments of the movie where, for me, the masochistic dimensions of Marlene and Petra’s relationship snaps into focus. Having been let down by Karin, Petra, alone and unburdened by makeup or costume, reaches out to Marlene with words of affection and care. Marlene promptly moves off camera before returning with a briefcase. She packs her belongings, including a small revolver, dons a fashionable black coat that to me echoes Petra’s robe from the first act, and leaves the apartment, seemingly for good.
There’s a common saying in the kink community that submissives are actually the ones in control of a scene. I’m not going to tease out the complications of that sentiment today, but the basic point of it is that, in a consensual SM relationship, the submissive partner sets the boundaries that the dominant has to work within. The dominant and submissive can mold those boundaries together in order to create a fulfilling relationship for both parties, but generally the submissive has the final say, as they are the one allowing pain to be directed toward their person by the dominant. Again, it’s more complicated than this basic summary suggests, but this is often used to explain to folks outside of the community how the dynamics that might seem abusive at first glance are actually based on pre-arranged consent. Movies often don’t include this step, which is understandable. Sometimes the realities of consent negotiations don’t make for screen characters that are conventionally compelling (unless done well), and Marlene’s muteness is partly the point of her character. Marlene silently watches Petra’s relationships and suffers her abuse because she loves Petra. She is the leopard idolizing Dionysus in the painting, but when Petra turns the tables and seeks comfort in Marlene, the roles have been so broken that Marlene leaves. The inclusion of the gun among Marlene’s belongings helps to cement this for me, as it evidences that Marlene always knew and had some means of protection, but never used it because, despite (or perhaps because of) the abuse, she was happy in her role as Petra’s factotum. She knows that Petra’s terms of endearment aren’t genuine—they’re a reflection of Petra’s dual role as both imperious taskmaster and fragile clingy little bird. Marlene was happy to fulfill her role as bottom rung of the ladder, but when she’s asked to take on a role that allows Petra to express her vulnerability, the relationship comes to its abrupt end, as does the film.
Stray Thoughts
I know Fassbinder was famously in an interracial relationship with El Hedi ben Salem, and this fixation with white-black relationships shows up here when Karin breaks the news to Petra that she’d recently slept with a black American man in Germany. The racial politics aren’t really dwelt upon, but they’re there as we see Petra, who’d previously been something of a high fashion libertine, suddenly retreat into a cultural conservatism on the subject of interracial romance.
We never see the two cats after the opening credits, but in Peter Matthews’ essay for the Criterion edition of the film, he remarks on how the cats mirror George Cukor’s The Women where each of the main female stars are likened to different animals in the opening scene. The cats, per Matthews, play a similar role in Fassbinder’s film, demonstrating the subtle habits of cohabitation and hiding their murderous instincts beneath demure behavior.
Right above the doorframe to the bedroom, there’s a little ceramic dachshund whose shadow is constantly projected above the door. I don’t have much to say about it, but it just caught my eye whenever it was on screen.
Why would you bring a whole pineapple on a fruit tray and nothing to cut it with?