On demand: "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant"

Subtitled "A Case History", 1972's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is the film to pull down from the shelf should you seek to discover (or prove) just what a singular sonofabitch Rainer Werner Fassbinder was. In form, it's a melodrama that suggests what would have happened had noted football bruisers Ron "Chopper" Harris, Neil "Razor" Ruddock, Vinnie "No Nickname Necessary" Jones and Norman "Bites Yer Legs" Hunter headed to the park after several beers for a friendly kickabout - the twist is that all its characters are women, making this the only movie in history to pre-empt both the Almodóvar filmography and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The surface is civilised enough: at her artfully appointed loft apartment, fashion designer Petra von K rises - blinking at the sun, like the vampire she is - to another day of pampered luxury. Her newly divorced status gestures toward some reserves of audience goodwill and sympathy, but these are almost immediately upended and squandered. Played by Margit Carstensen - who suggests Fassbinder dragged up as Delphine Seyrig in the previous year's Daughters of Darkness, or Esther Rantzen restyled by Vivienne Westwood - she starts snapping at her mute assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann), quickly abandoning interest in almost everyone who passes through her doors while playing the surviving members of her entourage off against one another. 

As she finally gets what's been coming to her all along - wounding if not mortal injury, a metaphorical stake through the heart - it becomes clear Fassbinder is making his perverse idea of merry with a perceived cruelty in human relations; it's what could very easily be taken for power games and S&M, even in the absence of gimp masks and riding crops. Some of us have lived long enough to discount this brutal worldview as horseshit - or at least a deeply unhealthy and unhelpful starting position for anyone seeking affection. Yet it's a fascinating startpoint for drama, because it cuts through the consoling banalities and cliches that inevitably pop up whenever the rest of us talk about love. (It's something like how Catherine Breillat's wonky view of the state of play between the sexes carries her films off into new, agitating, properly complex territory.) "People are terrible," Petra laments, amid what turns out to be one of her happier interactions. "Everyone is replaceable." The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is the film that, for two hours, banishes all memory of Richard Curtis from the cinema.

It began life as a five-act play, and Fassbinder is honest enough not to hide that fact: it's one set, and a small, knotty ensemble moving in and out, gabbing as they go. You could usefully watch the film on mute to study its framing, and how much is conveyed about these relationships through framing alone. The action is variously a merry-go-round, a farce, a ballet, a wrestling match, a circular dance of death; it's often just a car crash, playing out on shagpile carpet the colour of overnight snow that forever seems to invite splatter of some kind. Yet the talk is where the film's dynamism really resides. These characters wield words the way the killers in horror movies do knives and hammers; they speak brutally and unflinchingly. In doing so, they help define Fassbinder's place in film history, as the brute who elbowed his way into the international consciousness to occupy the decade or so separating Bergman's confessional 60s masterworks from the slasher film and the video nasty. (There's a cosmic aptness to the fact his collected works wound up in the Arrow Films back catalogue, nestled alongside Zombie Flesh Eaters and The Driller Killer.)

I say occupy, because it's possible now to see Fassbinder as the pantheon's squalid squatter, a creative far more horribly charismatic and compelling than many of his era's respectable artisans: stubborn, fervent, noxious, unyielding. What continues to amaze me, given how prolific their maker was in his short time on this Earth, is how steady and foursquare the films themselves are. Fassbinder isn't a speed freak the way Godard was and certain Asian genre directors are, knocking 'em out for the sake of knocking 'em out. Wide-eyed onlookers could take against the verbal onslaught of Bitter Tears, particularly when these exclusively white characters start sounding off about race - in that offhand way that plenty of white characters in 1970s texts sounded off about race. But, appalled though they might be, even they would surely have to concede how Fassbinder makes his weight felt, like a kid slowly removing a trapped housefly's wings and then grinding a thick thumb down on the torso, or - to return to that earlier football metaphor - like a centre half who wins the ball but follows through on his opponent just shy of waist height. It ain't pretty, it ain't at all fair, and - being drawn from reportedly extreme examples in Fassbinder's own personal life - it's scarcely representative. But I defy you to look away when it all finally kicks off.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is available on DVD through Arrow, and to stream via You Tube, Prime Video, the BFI Player and the Arrow Player.