An apartment can be an entire universe. Or, more precisely, a baroque prison, a terrarium for the soul in which human passions, deprived of the oxygen of the outside world, grow hypertrophic, monstrous, and magnificent. This is the scenic and mental space of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1972 chamber masterpiece, a work that distills the very essence of his cinema into 124 minutes of chromatic claustrophobia and psychological cruelty. Based on his own play, the film never attempts to hide its theatrical origins; on the contrary, it exalts them, transforming the spatial limitation into an absolute declaration of poetics. Hell, as Sartre taught us in Huis Clos, is truly other people, especially when you are forced to share their carpets and stale air.

Petra von Kant's room (a monumental Margit Carstensen) is not just a bourgeois interior. It is an installation, a diorama of her own psyche. Faceless mannequins, like golems waiting for a soul, populate the space, a silent echo of her profession as a fashion designer. On the walls, a huge reproduction of Poussin's Midas and Bacchus serves as a memento mori and thematic manifesto: a perennial warning about the consequences of greed and desire that transforms everything it touches not into gold, but into its sterile, deadly imitation. In this sanctuary of artifice, Petra reigns like a despotic queen over her only subject: her silent, submissive, and omnipresent assistant Marlene (an unforgettable Irm Hermann), who moves like an efficient ghost, recording her mistress's every whim, every outburst, every tear with the precision of a typewriter and the empty gaze of a supreme judge.

The narrative, divided almost into theatrical acts, is disarmingly simple. Petra, fresh from a failed marriage and immersed in an emotional autarchy tinged with contempt for men, falls madly in love with the young and beautiful Karin Thimm (Hanna Schygulla), an aspiring model from a working-class background. What follows is a Proustian manual on the pathology of love, dissected with the precision of a surgeon and the ruthlessness of an entomologist. Fassbinder is not interested in celebrating lesbian love; he is interested in exposing love as the most sophisticated and brutal form of power transaction. The relationship between Petra and Karin is a battlefield where class, culture, age, and expectations clash. Petra does not love Karin; she loves the idea of molding her, possessing her, projecting her own ideal of beauty and devotion onto her. Karin, for her part, does not love Petra; she succumbs to her charm and exploits her power, offering her body and youth in exchange for social advancement. It is a duel reminiscent of that between Margo Channing and Eve Harrington, but stripped of any Hollywood glamour and immersed in an atmosphere of Greek tragedy on amphetamines.

The genius of Fassbinder, and his director of photography Michael Ballhaus, lies in making this theatrical stasis cinematic. The camera moves with a hypnotic and predatory slowness. Zoom lenses close in on faces, trapping the actresses in the frame, isolating a detail, a tic, a grimace. The pans cross the room with icy fluidity, connecting the characters but at the same time emphasizing the unbridgeable distance between them. Mirrors and reflective surfaces multiply images, fragment identities, suggesting that every emotion is a performance, every confession a charade. This visual style owes everything, as Fassbinder himself never tired of admitting, to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is the conceptual equivalent of a Sirk film: it takes its saturated colors, exaggerated passions, and implicit criticism of bourgeois morality, but removes the consolatory veil of the happy ending, leaving the viewer with only the bare and cruel scaffolding of emotional mechanisms. Petra is the German, nihilistic version of the heroines of Lana Turner or Jane Wyman, a woman who discovers that all paradise allows is, in the end, a gilded cage built with her own hands.

Every dialogue is a stab in the back, a philosophical diatribe masked as small talk. Fassbinder writes as if every word were a weapon and every silence a threat. Margit Carstensen's performance is a tour de force that spans the entire human emotional spectrum: from calculating seduction to ecstatic abandonment, from raging jealousy to the most abject self-pity. Her drunken, desperate telephone monologue on her birthday is one of the high points of modern cinema, a desperate opera aria sung in a desert of loneliness. Faced with this storm, Hanna Schygulla counters with a performance of calculated and almost bored indifference. Her Karin is not a femme fatale, but a pragmatic survivor who instinctively understands the rules of the game and uses them to her advantage.

But the real seismic center of the film, its moral black hole, is Marlene. Her silence is not absence, but absolute presence. She is the gaze through which we viewers observe the tragedy. She is the working class that serves and observes the decadence of the artistic bourgeoisie. She is the unrequited and undeclared love, purer and more terrible than that shouted by Petra. Her every gesture—typing, serving a drink, picking up a broken glass—is charged with a repressed meaning that will only explode in the finale. Her final rebellion, as cathartic as it is chilling, is not only a servant's revolt against her mistress, but the very negation of Petra's value system. Marlene destroys the idol not with words, but with action, with her departure, with the assertion of her own silent existence. It is an ending that elevates the film from a psychological study to a universal parable about the relationship between oppressors and oppressed, between those who speak and those who act.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant was shot in just ten days, a feat that testifies to the almost telepathic symbiosis Fassbinder had achieved with his crew and his “clan” of favorite actors. This urgency of production translates into a feverish intensity that runs through every frame. It is a film that breathes and suffocates along with its characters. A work that, decades later, has lost none of its stinging power. It is not an easy film, nor is it consoling. It is an all-encompassing aesthetic and emotional experience, a journey into the heart of darkness of human relationships, where love is only the most presentable name we give to our need to dominate and be dominated. It is the chrysalis from which Fassbinder's future masterpieces will emerge, from Fear Eats the Soul to The Marriage of Maria Braun, but which remains, in its formal perfection and radical honesty, an unsurpassed work, a black and ruthless diamond set forever in the history of cinema.