Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, 1976
Starring:
Margit Carstensen, Ulli Lommel, Anna Karina, Macha Meril
Ariane
and Gerhard, a wealthy married couple, are heading out on separate weekends.
Though they both pretend to be traveling, they are actually meeting their
long-time lovers. Their disabled daughter, Angela, plans it so that both
couples – Gerhard and his French mistress Irene, and Ariane and her lover
Kolbe, who is also Gerhard’s assistant – will wind up at the family’s country
house. Though the adults initially overcome the awkwardness with laughter, Angela
soon shows up to further complicate things and manipulate the tense environment.
She forces her parents, their lovers, the angry housekeeper, her strange son,
and Angela’s mute governess to partake in a game of Chinese Roulette, which is
sure to end in violence.
Jean-Luc
Godard once stated that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.
Fassbinder certainly played with this convention in Chinese Roulette, one of his lesser seen triumphs that runs the
gamut from Gothic horror and psychological melodrama to country-house mystery. His
first international production, this film is also somewhat unique in his
catalog in that it focused on an ensemble, rather than a single, tormented
protagonist. The film focuses almost equally on its eight characters, a blend
of Fassbinder’s regular actors and new faces: Angela (Andrea Schober of Merchant of the Four Seasons), her
parents Ariane (Margit Carstensen) and Gerhart (Alexander Allerson from My Name is Nobody and Battle of Britain), their lovers Irene
(Godard’s muse and former wife Anna Karina) and Kolbe (Ulli Lommel), the
housekeeper Kast (Brigitte Mira), her son Gabriel (Volker Spengler), and Angela’s
nurse (giallo actress Macha Meril).
Angela
is one of Fassbinder’s more mysterious characters. She is sympathetic, but also
seems to be the antagonist. She clearly blames her parents for her disability
and wants to get revenge on them. She states that she fell ill 11 years ago –
the same time that her father took Irene as his lover – but doesn’t explain the
exact nature of her illness. Her revenge is primarily psychological and in the
form of forcing her family together for an uncomfortable weekend, where her
very appearance wears on her mother. Her coup de grace involves a game of
Chinese roulette, where the members of one team ask another team questions.
Their answers all refer to one unanimous, but secret person that the other team
must figure out.
While
the parents and their lovers are incredibly bourgeois, there is something
otherworldly about Angela, perhaps because of her disability. She is not the
only character that feels out of time and place. Gabriel, the housekeeper’s
strange, adult son, is asexual and has a bizarrely Aryan appearance with
white-blonde hair. He spouts Nietzschean philosophy, which he claims is his own
writing, though Angela reveals at the end of the film that she knows it is
plagiarized. Her mute governess also has this somewhat supernatural sense.
These three figures seem to have emerged from out of Gothic literature: a
disturbed girl on the verge of sexual maturity kept prisoner by her disability,
her beautiful, obedient, and silent maid, and a sexually ambiguous servant who
aims above his station and is capable of violence.
While
Chinese Roulette is different from
many of Fassbinder’s other films, it does contain some of his reused themes,
namely emotional cruelty, family alienation, and a complicated relationship
between a mother and her child. Angela’s father seems to love and indulge her,
but her mother is inexplicably filled with hatred. She carries a gun in order
to point it at Angela when frustration and rage overwhelm her. The implication
is that she will inevitably resort to violence. And unlike Fassbinder’s earlier
films – such as I Only Want You to Love
Me, Martha, The Merchant of the Four Seasons, and others where a persecuted
character is hated for no reason by their mother – the dislike is mutual.
Angela blames and harassed her mother and is delighted at obvious signs of
Ariane’s torment.
Shot
in the country home/small castle owned by Fassbinder’s regular cinematographer Michael
Ballhaus, the Gothic themes and sense of impending violence are further
expressed by Chinese Roulette’s
visuals. Characters are bisected, framed, and confined by shots of glass
artifacts, windows and window frames, doorways, ornate mirrors, and strange
display columns in the middle of rooms. The lush countryside becomes more
menacing as it is contrasted by the dark forest that surrounds the estate,
shots of Angela’s collection of old, creepy dolls being removed from the trunk
of a car, and a scene that focuses on a rotting stag head. This was Fassbinder’s
biggest budget to date and it is certainly one of his most beautiful films,
perhaps only eclipsed by The Bitter Tears
of Petra von Kant or Veronika Voss.
Chinese Roulette comes highly
recommended. For whatever reason, it is not usually listed among Fassbinder’s
masterpieces, but it certainly deserves a viewing or two and may appeal to
those bored by Fassbinder’s films about working-class oppression. It is available
on DVD, though I would love to see it on a mid-period Fassbinder Criterion
box-set alongside Martha and Whity. Fans of restrained Gothic
thrillers will also definitely want to check this out.
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