'Water falling on burning rocks', based on an unfilmed play by Fassbinder, opens with cheesy picture postcard views of Berlin to stereotypically bright Gallic music. The image is cheerfully Fassbinderean (sic?), an image of the fake, official 'reality' that the film will seek to undermine. It is also a cinematic version of Magritte's famous painting 'Ceci n'est pas un pipe' - the static images are accompanied by matching sounds - car noises, church bells etc. - asking us to question the assumptions behind any 'image'.
So far, so Fassbinder. But it also points, from this opening, to how much this will be an Ozon film. Just as Melville filmed Cocteau's 'Les Enfants Terribles' with maximum faithfulness to the author's style, themes, motifs etc., so Ozon offers some quite extraordinary Fassbinder pastiche. He makes no attempts to 'open out' the play, because Fassbinder's best films were always 'theatrical', cramped, interior, very much concerned with ideas of performance and role playing. Ozon captures this cramped style perfectly, the unnaturally symmetrical compositons, the stylised positioning of actors, the intrusion of decor and framing, the jarring editing, the breaks in modes, from, say, intense psychodrama to a gloriously inane dance number.
But just as Melville's very faithfulness to Cocteau resulted in the ultimate Melville film, so 'Water' is pure Ozon. It's just not grimly rigorous enough to be a Fassbinder film. This is fine - we're not up to Fassbinder in the year 2000, we're more intellectually flaccid than people were in the 1970s, we cannot take such uncompromising, bitter pills without a sugar coating. This is our fault, not Ozon's, and certainly not Fassbinder's.
Fassbinder's films were often comic, but gruelling so - laughter was never a relief, but a shock of recognition, even horror. Here comedy prevents the material from ever being truly harrowing. This is not to suggest that the characters are one-dimensional, or the actors aren't up to it. Far from it. As in Fassbinder, 'psychological truth' is rejected, because it is a lie, and we get more profound insights into characters from the use of colour (e.g. a shirt matching a lamp), mirrors, lighting, mise-en-scene, and some superbly staged set-pieces, such as the remarkable final shot of Vera struggling to open the window, trying to let some air into this intolerable, fatally claustrophobic atmosphere - we see her as the camera zooms from outside, like a mime-artist trapped in an invisible structure of her own making.
But at those moments where Fassbinder is at his most intense, when the role-playing, and the easily-made speeches and the contrived situations reach a pitch, and everything stands at a naked, exposed, intolerable silence, Ozon will play some music, distancing in a formal, Fassbinder way, but also giving the audience a more comfortably ironic viewpoint, one where we are not required to suffer consequences.
But, as I say, despite the familiar Fassbinder milieu (characters, types, names, sexual traumas, even situations), this is a very French film. The difference in language, for instance, is not superficial, harsh, gutteral German seeming all the more repressive and aggressive. My reference to Cocteau wasn't entirely gratuitous, there is something of 'Les Enfants Terribles' in this Teutonic chamber-play, a lightness of form structuring this heavy drama, in this four-character psychodrama, poised exquisitely between elaborate game and emotional tragedy. Some of the filming of Franz, especially near the end, having taken poison and wearing Vera's fur coat, has a sublimely Cocteau-like grace, to go with the lighting and shifting points of view; taking the drama out of the tragicomically domestic into the realm of fantasy and myth.
So far, so Fassbinder. But it also points, from this opening, to how much this will be an Ozon film. Just as Melville filmed Cocteau's 'Les Enfants Terribles' with maximum faithfulness to the author's style, themes, motifs etc., so Ozon offers some quite extraordinary Fassbinder pastiche. He makes no attempts to 'open out' the play, because Fassbinder's best films were always 'theatrical', cramped, interior, very much concerned with ideas of performance and role playing. Ozon captures this cramped style perfectly, the unnaturally symmetrical compositons, the stylised positioning of actors, the intrusion of decor and framing, the jarring editing, the breaks in modes, from, say, intense psychodrama to a gloriously inane dance number.
But just as Melville's very faithfulness to Cocteau resulted in the ultimate Melville film, so 'Water' is pure Ozon. It's just not grimly rigorous enough to be a Fassbinder film. This is fine - we're not up to Fassbinder in the year 2000, we're more intellectually flaccid than people were in the 1970s, we cannot take such uncompromising, bitter pills without a sugar coating. This is our fault, not Ozon's, and certainly not Fassbinder's.
Fassbinder's films were often comic, but gruelling so - laughter was never a relief, but a shock of recognition, even horror. Here comedy prevents the material from ever being truly harrowing. This is not to suggest that the characters are one-dimensional, or the actors aren't up to it. Far from it. As in Fassbinder, 'psychological truth' is rejected, because it is a lie, and we get more profound insights into characters from the use of colour (e.g. a shirt matching a lamp), mirrors, lighting, mise-en-scene, and some superbly staged set-pieces, such as the remarkable final shot of Vera struggling to open the window, trying to let some air into this intolerable, fatally claustrophobic atmosphere - we see her as the camera zooms from outside, like a mime-artist trapped in an invisible structure of her own making.
But at those moments where Fassbinder is at his most intense, when the role-playing, and the easily-made speeches and the contrived situations reach a pitch, and everything stands at a naked, exposed, intolerable silence, Ozon will play some music, distancing in a formal, Fassbinder way, but also giving the audience a more comfortably ironic viewpoint, one where we are not required to suffer consequences.
But, as I say, despite the familiar Fassbinder milieu (characters, types, names, sexual traumas, even situations), this is a very French film. The difference in language, for instance, is not superficial, harsh, gutteral German seeming all the more repressive and aggressive. My reference to Cocteau wasn't entirely gratuitous, there is something of 'Les Enfants Terribles' in this Teutonic chamber-play, a lightness of form structuring this heavy drama, in this four-character psychodrama, poised exquisitely between elaborate game and emotional tragedy. Some of the filming of Franz, especially near the end, having taken poison and wearing Vera's fur coat, has a sublimely Cocteau-like grace, to go with the lighting and shifting points of view; taking the drama out of the tragicomically domestic into the realm of fantasy and myth.