Review: 'Peter von Kant' Reimagines Fassbinder's Original, Keeps it Gay

Prolific gay writer-director François Ozon returns with a remake of the 1972 Fassbinder film that's "loosely based" on the original but doesn't stray much from its key points – including its same-sex love story.

Ozon retains the year, but switches the locale from Bremen, Germany, to Cologne and the gender of the title character, transforming her from Petra to Peter. There are other changes, as well. Petra was a fashion designer; Peter is a film director. The appropriate alterations to the occupations and genders of other characters follow suit.

Peter (Denis Ménochet) is preparing for a new film to be shot in Bavaria. He's written a role for a favorite actress, but when a longtime collaborator and friend, an actress and singer named Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani), shows up with a new boy toy in tow – handsome aspiring actor Amir (Khalil Gharbia) – he's smitten on the spot, forgetting all about his recent breakup with his longtime boyfriend and doing some gender-flipping on his own script, rewriting the role for the alluring 23-year-old.

It's not long before Peter draws Amir into his bed. But there's more going on than a simple episode of the casting couch. Peter has fallen passionately, dramatically, and dysfunctionally in love with Amir, who quickly moves in and begins to treat Peter as shabbily as Peter's cinematic bent requires (which is to say, as shabbily as Peter treats his own masochistic male secretary, Karl [Stefan Crepon], a constant and silent presence who's always preternaturally ready to meet Peter's needs for a gin and tonic, a line of cocaine, or a spot of editing on a film).

The tears and jealous rages flow from there, with tantrums, dishes, and furniture being thrown. There's always a sense that Peter is getting his diva on – a notion that Ozon underscores by framing Peter together with mirrors and other reflective surfaces. The camera lingers, early on, for a long moment as Peter gazes at his own reflection while Sidonie, on an LP, sings "Each man kills the thing he loves" on the stereo. At other times, the mirrors are simply there in the background. They're part of Peter's natural environment, a way for him to supervise his own performance in the movie of his life.

That's the key to an underlying harder, darker edge – a suggestion that Peter lives dissociated from reality, seeing the world as a movie he's part of, and yet, in deeper and more genuine ways, not participating in. This, perhaps, makes for a natural talent when it comes to directing films ("Coupe!" Peter shouts, camera in hand, after a tearful Amir has told the tragic story of his life to the lens), but it also leaves Peter unable to venture past superficial, constant dramatics to the more serene aspect of a healthy, loving relationship. He's stuck, immutably, in the role of director: observing, correcting, even hectoring in order to get the responses he wants. "I see everything!" he screams at the friends and family who assemble, late in the film, for his 40th birthday party – an occasion marked, of course, with a meltdown. "The camera sees everything!" he reiterates. The verbal slip is telling. Peter doesn't know where he ends, and cinema begins.

The film reflects this in other ways, showing us Amir as Peter sees him: lit with a golden illumination, gorgeously framed, the camera roving over his naked flesh with building lust that he can only watch across an inevitable distance. Closing that gap for sex or lovers' quarrels is one thing, but if Peter makes a deeper connection that bridges the distance between hearts, the illusion will shatter – much as the film eventually pierces all the illusions Ozon has set up in a series of surprises and resolutions that arrive in the movie's final minutes.

It's a cineaste's feast, in other words, which is what you're in for when a director as talented and daring as Ozon sets out to put his own imprimatur on a work from an auteur as unique as Fassbinder. While Ozon hasn't taken the kind of liberties with Fassbinder's film that would make his new version a fresh work fashioned from whole cloth, he does succeed in tipping his hat to the original while infusing the film with his own darkly comic style.

In its way, "Peter von Kant" is simultaneously homage, remake, and something entirely original – a trifecta in itself, and a dazzlingly proficient work both visually and narratively.

"Peter von Kant" plays in theaters Sept. 2.