The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote the play in twelve hours on a flight and filmed it in ten days in 1972, keeping the single set and the all-female cast. It competed at the Berlinale that year and has become, alongside Fear Eats the Soul, the film most people mean when they say Fassbinder.

Margit Carstensen plays Petra, a designer conducting her life from a Bremen apartment dominated by a reproduction of Poussin's Midas and Bacchus; Hanna Schygulla is Karin, the younger woman who arrives wanting work. Irm Hermann plays Marlene, Petra's assistant, who types, dresses her, and does not speak for the entire film — a piece of staging that turns every scene into an argument about who is permitted a voice. Michael Ballhaus shoots it in long, gliding takes on one set, with costume and wig changes marking the passage of time.

Fassbinder based the material on his own relationships and made no effort to disguise it. The film is theatrical by design and pitiless about how quickly desire reorganises itself into ownership; Carstensen's performance, which runs from imperious to unbearable, is among the great screen turns of the 1970s. You have two Fassbinders already — this is the third that a European catalogue cannot really do without.