Spoiler: There's really not that much crying

Another of the foreign-language films that I needed to watch off my DVR before it expired was one from German arthouse director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a fashion designer living in apartment in Bremen, in the northern part of what was the old West Germany, together with her assistant/secretary Marlene (Irm Hermann). Petra treats Marlene like dirt, seemingly making her work day and night, even when people like Petra's sister Sidonie (Katrin Schaake) comes over to visit. Complicating this sort of ill treatment is the fact that Petra and Marlene may be having some sort of sexual relationship, something that might have been controversial when this movie was released back in 1972, but is fairly passé today.

But Petra is more likely bisexual, as she's been in two marriages, the first of which left her a pregnant widow, with daughter Gaby away at boarding school. Gaby, along with Petra's mother Valerie, show up for the final act since that's set some months later on Petra's birthday. But, once again, we're getting ahead of ourselves. There's one more main character we haven't met. That's Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young woman Sidonie and her husband met when they were in Australia. Karin and her husband are German but were living in Australia; she's decided to return because she couldn't take it in Australia.

Karin needs a legitimate job, and Petra offers her one as a model for her designs, although the presumption is that there are also going to be sexual favors involved. But with Karin modeling the clothes, Petra gets a chance as a major German department store is interested in the new designs. Those designs are in fact what the department store wants, and the major commission is good financial news for Petra.

However, it also gets Karin a job modeling, and one that means she's going to be away from Bremen a lot. Worse is when Karin gets a phone call from her husband saying that he's coming back to Germany, and could she come to Frankfurt to meet him. That's all too much for Petra.

There's not much going on in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, as the whole movie is set in that apartment. It's not nearly as obnoxious as some of the other arthouse films I've mentioned here relatively recently, but I think it's also not likely to appeal to the more casual movie fan. Fassbinder is very deliberate both with the camera movement as well as focus (often to focus on a frustrated Marlene in the background), which to me heightened the feeling of the movie being slow. One other thing that doesn't help is that Petra has a bunch of wigs that she wears over the course of the film. That can make things harder to follow, especially if you don't speak German and have to rely on the subtitles.