About two-thirds of the way into Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1976 film Chinese Roulette, the titular game begins. The dinner party must split into two groups. The first group secretly chooses a person from the second group, and then the second group must ask a series of questions - two apiece - in order to guess which of them the first group has chosen. The dining room is filled with mirrors and Plexiglas boxes, a series of reflective surfaces which begin to double and triple the dinner guests. The dinner guests slide and swoop around each other, as the camera does the same, doubling and tripling and bisecting and trisecting themselves into different formations.
They've already started the process of multiplying at the start - we have four pairs here, all connected in various tentacled patterns. The husband and wife. Their respective lovers. The two women seem awfully attracted to each other; the two men pick up on this and joke that perhaps they themselves should kiss.
The married pair's crippled daughter and her governess. The governess is sleeping with the housekeeper's son. The daughter seems to have her eye on him too. And the housekeeper watches them all with disgust.
All these people end up gathered in the same country house for a weekend, manipulated into it by the daughter. Before the daughter shows up they seem to be preparing themselves to just go with it and have everybody sleeping with everybody, but then the daughter arrives and arousal turns to stunted fury. Her paralyzed legs drove her parents into the arms of others in the first place, and now she's messing things up again, just when they've got things working. A crack runs through the face of every brittle surface - this is a world on the verge of shattering.
And shatter it does, spectacularly, into a million beautiful shards. This movie is so wonderful to look at I could've taken screen-grabs from every single frame. As the players play their game, trapped in this room of reflection, the camera moves among them and like diamonds they refract and disassemble the light around them, splitting into gorgeous configurations from every single angle. It's been awhile since I've felt the urge to just slap down a pile of screen-grabs for a movie but this one demanded it. I purposefully mixed these up since I took so many, so it's not just a straight-up flip-book of the movie, but it's still pretty definitive of my most favorite favorite shots in the beautiful, beautiful film.
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They've already started the process of multiplying at the start - we have four pairs here, all connected in various tentacled patterns. The husband and wife. Their respective lovers. The two women seem awfully attracted to each other; the two men pick up on this and joke that perhaps they themselves should kiss.
The married pair's crippled daughter and her governess. The governess is sleeping with the housekeeper's son. The daughter seems to have her eye on him too. And the housekeeper watches them all with disgust.
All these people end up gathered in the same country house for a weekend, manipulated into it by the daughter. Before the daughter shows up they seem to be preparing themselves to just go with it and have everybody sleeping with everybody, but then the daughter arrives and arousal turns to stunted fury. Her paralyzed legs drove her parents into the arms of others in the first place, and now she's messing things up again, just when they've got things working. A crack runs through the face of every brittle surface - this is a world on the verge of shattering.
And shatter it does, spectacularly, into a million beautiful shards. This movie is so wonderful to look at I could've taken screen-grabs from every single frame. As the players play their game, trapped in this room of reflection, the camera moves among them and like diamonds they refract and disassemble the light around them, splitting into gorgeous configurations from every single angle. It's been awhile since I've felt the urge to just slap down a pile of screen-grabs for a movie but this one demanded it. I purposefully mixed these up since I took so many, so it's not just a straight-up flip-book of the movie, but it's still pretty definitive of my most favorite favorite shots in the beautiful, beautiful film.
.
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1 comment:
Just watched this movie, your review is spot on. It was fucking gorgeous! Up there with 'Bitter Tears' and 'Lola' as one of my favorite Fassbinder's ever. Great piece of cinema.
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