Review by Beatrice On 14-May-2023
Every man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Cologne 1972.
The director Peter Von Kant is awakened by a phone call.
Karl, who never speaks and executes his master's peremptory orders without hesitation, observes and devotes himself to unconditional servitude.
Sidonie arrives, an actress whom Peter has launched, now a diva in attitude and appearance, bringing with her the young Amir.
A 23-year-old with thick black hair, who immediately attracts the director's obsession, to whom he promises an inviting career.
He films him, asks him questions, kisses him, seduces him, keeps him with champagne and crustaceans.
Between cocaine and scripts about the portrait of a woman, they talk about humility, transparency, manipulation, violence, art, "creation that contracts while killing frees..."
The giant photograph of Sidonie in the bedroom makes him admit that he loves the actress more than the woman, while he declares to Amir that he is madly in love with him.
After nine months, the power dynamic between them changes radically: Amir unleashes Peter's obsession, that of possessing him totally and unconditionally, while ridiculing him and distancing himself from him.
The arrival of the daughter and mother for the director's birthday will complete the described character picture.
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
After 50 years since the presentation of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Ozon intends to pay tribute to Fassbinder by changing the gender of the protagonist from Petra to Peter, from a woman to a man, from a fashion designer to a director, because here Peter, embodied by the powerful physique of Menochet, is Rainer Werner Fassbinder himself with all his genius and unruliness, his obsessions and dependencies, his charismatic and manipulative character, his openly declared bisexuality.
All of this is constructed within an interior full of images that represent the visceral nature of the artist's passions, as he does not hesitate to mistreat and humiliate his assistant, especially when the young Maghrebi Amir arrives, upon whom he focuses his obsession entirely.
Moving from lesbian to homoerotic turmoil, in addition to reflecting Ozon's cinema, serves to narrate the tragic love story between Fassbinder and his idol actor, representing it all through a scenography similar to the master's apartment, where in addition to the music and the quotation from Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol, one witnesses the iconography of Amir pierced by arrows like that of Saint Sebastian, the martyr portrayed by Mantegna, Perugino, Antonello da Messina.
But who is Amir a martyr of? Peter's obsession, his own narcissism, or Sidonie's instrumentalization?
The tears of Peter von Kant are bitter, especially in the awareness of not knowing how to love but only being capable of possessing, and in the certainty that "love is more treacherous than death."
He who loves too much, who loves too long,
Who sells, who gives honor;
Who performs the gesture with many tears,
Who does it without pain:
For every man kills what he loves,
But not everyone always ends up with the Creator.
14-May-2023 by Beatrice