Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes (2000) - film review

Germany in the 1970s.  Whilst waiting for his girlfriend, a young student, Franz, allows himself to be picked up by 50-year old businessman, Léopold.  In his apartment, Léopold provokes Franz into revealing his homosexual experiences and soon manages to seduce him.  Six months later, Frantz has moved in with Léopold and they appear to live as an ordinary married couple.  The strain is beginning to show, however, and after a row Frantz threatens to leave.  Whilst Léopold is away, Frantz is visited by his former girlfriend, Anna, and their romance is soon rekindled.  Before the two lovers can escape, Léopold returns and his charms persuade Anna to stay.    Léopold’s ex-lover Vera then makes an unexpected appearance and the menagerie is complete...

Freely adapted from an obscure play by the famed German director Rainer Fassbinder (written when he was just 19), Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes makes a pessimistic yet profoundly incisive study of the destructive power of desire.  It was directed by François Ozon, who has achieved international acclaim and celebrity – at a remarkably young age – for his distinctive, almost totally unclassifiable style of cinema.  Ozon’s films, of which this is a fairly representative example, merge black comedy, drama and satire, and invariably involve themes of a dark and complex sexual nature, portrayed in an oddly playful and upbeat manner.  The film’s small but beautifully formed cast comprises just four actors - Bernard Giraudeau, Malik Zidi, Ludivine Sagnier and Anna Thomson - all of whom appear to have been custom-built for Ozon’s trademark mélange of the absurd and the frankly sinister.

Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes retreads ground covered in Ozon’s previous film, Les Amants criminels.  Both films resemble a blacker-than-black gay fantasy in which an attractive young man finds himself imprisoned by an older man who makes him his sexual slave.  However, whereas Les Amants criminals gets tangled up by its implausible plot (which seems incapable of reconciling its fantastic and realist elements), Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes is a more sophisticated and coherent work, its theatrical stylisation lending it a taut dreamlike pseudo-reality.  The claustrophobic setting and small cast emphasise the overwhelming sense of confinement, showing that the protagonists have become prisoners through their mutual need for one another.  If Fassbinder had worked on a film with Harold Pinter, it would almost certainly have looked like this.

As is typical of Ozon, Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes goes off in some totally unexpected directions and frequently wrong-foots the audience.  Just as the film looks as if it might be heading towards melodrama (with Léopold about to discover Frantz’s plan to elope with Anna), it explodes into wild bedroom farce, which includes an outrageous (and totally unexpected) musical sequence (a prelude to what we see in Ozon’s later film, 8 femmes).  This is nothing less than an insane spoof of a banal situation comedy.   However, Ozon has a few more cards to play and he is not going to allow his audience to enjoy this light diversion for too long.  The farce suddenly evaporates and is replaced by something much darker, much more introspective and disturbing.  The folly of physical love - its destructive power, its apparent pointlessness – is exposed in an emotionally intense sequence which culminates in an overly theatrical death and some powerful moments of reflection.  This is a chillingly cynical view of life, love and human relationships, yet, through its darkly Germanic poetry, we can easily discern a few grains of truth.

© James Travers 2003

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