A very famous fashion designer, Petra von Kant lives a life as a free and independent woman, assisted by Marlene, who is at the same time her secretary, her designer and her entirely submissive maid. Petra falls madly in love with Karin, a young proletarian whom she decides to make her star model. Passion turns into morbid jealousy. Marlene observes her boss revealing her fragility, then becoming a slave in turn when Karin leaves to join her husband...
Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapts one of his plays and retains the theatrical huis clos. In a setting filled with gilding and flashy mirrors, the filmmaker composes sublime portraits of women, like this capricious, authoritarian and inhuman Petra. An illustration of vanity and the pain of love, Petra von Kant's Bitter Tears is one of its author's most brilliant melodramas. Gorgeous !
THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT
(1972 – Colors – 124 mins)
SUPPLEMENTS
. CONVERSATION WITH RW FASSBINDER (48 mins)
The longest interview with the filmmaker ever.
Released October 5, 2011
