Chinese Roulette

Starring:Anna Karina, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, Ulli Lommel, Volker Spengler, Alexander Allerson, Andrea Schober, Macha MÃ©ril, Roland Henschke, Armin Meier, Erik Schumann
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Studio: Fox Lorber
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

An elegantly baroque exercise from the middle of his brief and brilliant career, Chinese Roulette finds Rainer Werner Fassbinder exploring the sinister side of a weekend in the country. At an isolated mansion, a husband and wife bump into each other--with their lovers in tow. Their lame daughter shows up with her mute nanny, adding to the tension, and the festivities culminate in a spiteful truth-telling game. Fassbinder choreographs the claustrophobic action as though it were Last Year at Marienbad filmed as soap opera parody, with glittering contributions from cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and RWF's longtime composer, Peer Raben. It's fun to watch, although the decadent sense of a snake chasing its tail ultimately makes this one feel like minor-league Fassbinder. Along with stock-company regulars Margit Carstensen and Brigitte Mira, the cast includes a pair of former Godard heroines (still looking stunning), Anna Karina and Macha Meril. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews:

"Eavesdroppers often hear the false truth.".......2006-05-19

Wealthy businessman Gerhard Christ (Alexander Allerson) leaves his stiff emotionless wife, Ariane (Margit Carstensen) and sulky physically disabled daughter, Angela (Andrea Schober) for the weekend. Ostensibly, he's traveling on business to Oslo, but in reality, he meets long-term mistress Irene Cartis (Anna Karina) at the airport, and together they drive to his country chateau for a dirty weekend. Meanwhile, his wife, Ariane, thinking her hubbie is safely off in Oslo, packs her bags and leaves for the chateau with her lover Kolbe (Ulli Lommel). When Angela catches on, and realizes that her father is lying about his whereabouts, she too heads for the chateau with her mute, serene governess, Traunitz (Macha Meril).

All the characters descend upon the chateau, destined for embarrassment and an ultimate showdown. Faithful--but unpleasant housekeeper Kast (Brigitte Mira) and her son--would-be author Gabriel (Volker Spengler)--maintain the chateau in the Christ family's absence. Kast is a fascinating, repulsive character. Her face smacks disapproval of the Christs' behaviour, but more than anything else, she loathes Angela. She's not alone in this feeling. Angela's mother loathes her daughter too, and Angela--not unaware of the total lack of maternal feeling, goads her mother constantly. It becomes apparent that the housekeeper has been aware for some time that both Mr. and Mrs. Christ have long-term lovers--and she's juggled both adulterous couples separately at the chateau on weekends. So while each of the Christs have remained in ignorance about their spouse's affair, Kast knew. Is she a faithful, close-mouthed retainer, or she is disloyal for keeping quiet? This paradox is just one of the puzzles in "Chinese Roulette."

One of German director Werner Rainer Fassbinder's favourite themes is the inherent exploitive nature of human relationships, and this theme is at work in "Chinese Roulette"--one of Fassbinder's most stylized films. Obviously there's a hierarchy of power in all the relationships--both of the Christs, for example, select extra-marital partners who are substantially socially and economically their 'inferiors.' The relationships between the characters are not connected by emotion--instead the relationships are glued together poorly by obligation, exploitation, or payment. The unloved and apparently unwanted Angela--who operates under the assumption that her parents' adultery is connected to her disability--uses a game she calls "Chinese Roulette" to bring everyone together in what appears to be a socially acceptable setting, but in reality this nasty, spiteful game of truth reveals the underlying pathology in all their relationships. Fassbinder fans should enjoy this lesser-known title. In German with English subtitles--displacedhuman

One cult movie and one of the top of Fassbinder!.......2004-08-27

This film literally broke the walls once more . Since the multidimensional and enormous creativity of Rainer Werner Fassbinder was unextinguible in that glorious decade , plenty of extraordinary and innovative proposals.
Fassbinder explores the emotional universe of a smart girl who decides to make a surprise for her parents. They decided to divorce and actually have each one of them the respective lover . So the plan is very simple . She decides by herself to invite each one of them with the respective couple without knowing the fact the other will assist too to this weird invitation .
So can you imagine what can this clever fact origine in the surprise and the hidden feelings of both ex that forceful are very close of the boiling point of rage and hate?.
She has planned everything till the last detail . The dialogue is deeply disturbing , intriguing and challenging .
This imaginative and powerful script will lead us to a open ending which it will let opened the door to discuss with your beloved friends you invite to watch it .
One of the supreme and most awful films of the greatest german director of the Post War.
With the early death of that superb master (36) you will understand why Fassbinder told a friend who was requesting about his workholicism and the advise for him to rest (imagine what it meant to make thirty six films in just only seventeen years) this anticipated answer : I will sleep when I will be dead!

Hypnotically stylish, witty, but problematic Gothic thriller.......2003-08-23

Chinese Roulette (1976) is a hypnotically stylish, witty and puzzling Gothic thriller. Its several intertwined mysteries - some of plot, all of character - make it diabolically involving. Yet while its ambiguities are a strength, some nag more than they resonate. The DVD transfer is vivid.

After focusing on films about individual characters in the previous three years (Effi Briest, Fox and His Friends, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven), Fassbinder here creates a striking ensemble piece. Although each actor gives a finely-etched performance (including Fassbinder regulars Margit Carstensen, Ulli Lommel, and Brigitte Mira; plus two actresses associated with his idol Jean-Luc Godard: Macha Meril and Anna Karina), the screenplay is another matter. Several of the characters' names seem heavily symbolic, with some kind of tension between names with a biblical resonance (Christ, Angela, Gabriel), and others with a Greco-Roman bent (Ariane/Ariadne gave Theseus the thread to find his way out of the minotaur's labyrinth), Irene in Greek means peace. The implications behind each of those names can be forced into a reading of the film as a whole: Gabriel "announcing" a new world order (in his loopy "philosophy"); Ariane, in the final moments, helping lead Gerhard out of a sexual "labyrinth," etc. But after three viewings, the film feels top-heavy with symbols, yet they never come together as clues to reading the film, either straightforwardly or ironically. And the film's final image of a ghostly throng (their banner looks vaguely Nazi) marching outside the Christs' chateau does not meaningfully help clarify, or complexify, anything. The screenplay feels half-baked, although in other films Fassbinder is usually dead-on in his writing - including his use of subtle layers of meaning.

However there are several details to admire, including the sly way he plays with our expectations. Instead of some hand-wringing melodrama about infidelity, his four "adulterers" are remarkably sensitive to each other's foibles. And they are in committed, long-term infidelities (not a paradox in Fasbinder's world): Ariane and Kolbe have been together for seven years, Gerhard and Irene for eleven. And it was a stroke of twisted genius for Fassbinder to make sweet-faced, disabled little Angela, who loves to hug her dollies, the antagonist. Although we understand the possible motivation for her revenge on her parents, she is still a chilling creation. She also embodies one of Fassbinder's key themes in her manipulation of other people - either directly (her sadistic bossing of the sinister housekeeper), indirectly (her constant but unspoken provocation of her mother), or both (masterminding the climactic Chinese Roulette game).

Although Angela's scheming helps keep the narrative moving, like the other characters she never gels either as metaphor (too murky) or as a person (too vaguely drawn). Of course in many other films, Fassbinder did create characters who are simultaneously symbolic and real, like Effi Briest, "Fox" Biberkopf, Mother Kusters, and dozens of others. Despite many fine, small moments, the problems of character in this film also affect the overall dramatic scheme.

The dramatic problems reveal themselves clearly in the brief final act - the Chinese Roulette scene (reputedly one of Fassbinder's favorite pastimes). Although he masterfully builds up to the game, when it arrives the characters were not developed enough to give this climax its necessary force. I expected it to reveal something momentous not only about them but about the picture's themes. But it does not. And although there is plenty of psychosexual ambiguity, it feels more atmospheric than integral.

Throughout, Fassbinder seemed to use his eight characters to create a microcosm - but of what? A critique of the upper crust and/or upwardly mobile; of materialism? A satire on the foibles of desire, romantic habit, matrimony (at the end Fassbinder prints the marriage vows over that final eerie long shot of the possibly-Nazi ghosts)? Or, more darkly, does this group represent the profound failures of self-understanding which lead to fascism (the recurrent Nazi motif)? This film needed more of the psychological and thematic fullness of, say, Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939) or Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), which may have inspired it. (Fassbinder is a great filmmaker, who worked under tremendous strain: In 1976 he wrote and directed three feature films, plus staged a major production of Clare Boothe Luce's play The Women, even as he prepared to film it.)

The film is much more successful in the mysteries it suggests through image, which resonate long after memories of the story fade. Some are hauntingly poetic: Angela's diabolical dolls, a shot of a forest reflected onto a window and all of that reflected yet again in a mirror, the decaying head of a stag in the forest, and several more. Those images feel like a gloss on the macabre nature of Gothicism itself (with its love of death, decay, and doppelgangers), as much as on the particulars of this film. Those fleeting images seem to have bubbled up from some dark recess of Fassbinder's fantastically rich imagination, and that instinctively he put them in where they felt right. They do not have a pat meaning, which you can easily put into words; they are genuinely, richly ambiguous.

Amazon.com

Love Is Colder Than Death
The first feature in the frantic career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is, like Godard's debut Breathless, a nod to the traditional gangster movie. This time, however, the tough-guy attitudes are imparted to a trio of typical Fassbinder losers, slouching about in the drab underworld of Munich. They are played by Alain Delon lookalike Ulli Lommel (who poses in a trenchcoat and film noir fedora), Fassbinder himself, and the director's blond goddess Hanna Schygulla. The film works hard to subvert conventional notions of movie storytelling, with lots of loooong pauses and stylized gestures--and as such, feels more like a trial run than a full-blown Fassbinder meisterwork. But everywhere, in the insolent opening shot or the final thrilling cut from car interior to bleak landscape, you can sense the utter confidence that burbled out of this gifted German: he was only 23, and he was going places in a hurry. --Robert Horton

Gods of the Plague
The short-lived skyrocket named Rainer Werner Fassbinder began his prolific directing career with a burst of rule-breaking movies in 1969-70. Gods of the Plague, from that early eruption, is a kind of homage-deconstruction of the American crime movie, in the same vein as RWF's Love Is Colder Than Death and The American Soldier. An ex-con (zonked-out Harry Baer in an ankle-length leather jacket) wanders through grungy Munich, on an eventual collision course with a botched supermarket robbery. The film has virtually no narrative momentum, and carries the cheeky attitude of experimental theater--the movie stops cold as the hero listens to a German nonsense song in its entirety. Yet from the first five minutes you can sense the eye of a great filmmaker behind the exquisitely poised camera (clearly influenced in this one by the anything-goes spirit of early Godard). Fassbinder regulars Hanna Schygulla and Gunther Kaufmann are especially good here. --Robert Horton

Fear of Fear
If not among the better-known films by the gifted German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fear of Fear is nevertheless an absolutely characteristic work. A housewife, locked into a dull life with her distracted husband and two small children (plus nattering mother-in-law and sister-in-law living in the apartment upstairs) finds herself seized by uncontrollable anxiety. Although the wife has an affair with a doctor, there is little conventional melodrama; instead, Fassbinder strips away plot mechanics in favor of a complete identification with the woman's mysterious angst. The central role is tailor-made for one of RWF's favorite leading ladies, Margit Carstensen, whose regal cheekbones and elegant air belie the instability beneath the skin. Fassbinder's eye is exacting--the apartment is a dead-on purgatory of bourgeois nothingness--and his framing shows the influence of his Hollywood idol, Douglas Sirk. This is a small work in the bulging Fassbinder canon, but it's impeccably realized. --Robert Horton

Chinese Roulette
An elegantly baroque exercise from the middle of his brief and brilliant career, Chinese Roulette finds Rainer Werner Fassbinder exploring the sinister side of a weekend in the country. At an isolated mansion, a husband and wife bump into each other--with their lovers in tow. Their lame daughter shows up with her mute nanny, adding to the tension, and the festivities culminate in a spiteful truth-telling game. Fassbinder choreographs the claustrophobic action as though it were Last Year at Marienbad filmed as soap opera parody, with glittering contributions from cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and RWF's longtime composer, Peer Raben. It's fun to watch, although the decadent sense of a snake chasing its tail ultimately makes this one feel like minor-league Fassbinder. Along with stock-company regulars Margit Carstensen and Brigitte Mira, the cast includes a pair of former Godard heroines (still looking stunning), Anna Karina and Macha Meril. --Robert Horton

DVD:

DVD

DVD

DVD

Dragonheart - DTS

Humphrey Bogart Classics: Vol 1 - Casablanca / High Sierra

Kenneth Williams - An Audience With Kenneth Williams [1982]

DVD: Zero Woman: The Accused

Chicago Symphony Orchestra - Historic Telecasts - George Sze