After the daft, screwball comedy Satansbraten comes this obviously more sombre, portentous piece by Faßbinder.

A group of people gather in a mansion near Munich.  Gerhard Christ and his lover Irene Cartisse (played by Anna Karina, for sometime a star in films by Jean Luc Godard) arrive only for Gerhard to find his wife Ariane on the floor making love to his assistant Kolbe.  The heavy sombre portentous feel is underscored by the music of Mahler, indirectly alluding to Goethe´s work Faust 2, upon which the music is based.   This is an attempt to create a Gothic melodrama in the same manner as Henry James´s Turn of the Screw but it is vague, unsuccessful due mainly to the over-bearing pretentiousness that is scored throughout the film leading the viewer to believe that the film is somehow starkly symbolic.  A lasting image from the film is the Christ´s daughter Angela reading from Rimbaud while the camera pans to a statue of the crucifixion, then down to the dismembered head of a deer\ a horned skull.  The film is all so laughably deadpan, sombre in its evocation of very little, reminding this viewer of almost everything that is perhaps forgettable about European cinema.  The root of this may be Faßbinder´s own wish to be taken deadly seriously (Faßbinder left school at 16, perhaps his educational failure led him to either misunderstand or misrepresent the ideas that he felt to be important, to evoke the entirety of the Western cultural tradition in a film yet never successfully so, leaving the viewer with the feeling that the director, his film are trying way too hard), a feeling that he successfully undermines in his next, much better film Satansbraten.  Perhaps with Chinese Roulette Faßbinder himself realised that he had gone too far, that he was in danger of losing his audience, who were beginning to realise how awfully strained, unreal the director, his work, were becoming.

The obvious symbolism of the main character´s surname, the game of chess borrowed, perhaps, from Ingmar Bergmann´s Seventh Seal, would be almost lurid were it not all done with such an innocent touch.  This is the hallmark of Faßbinder´s film, what makes it successful when, in the hands of almost any other film-maker, it would be entirely ludicrous.  The little girl Angela is an entirely original Gothic creation, her collection of dolls, her weirdly prophetic quality all shine through as symbolic of artistic failures somehow turned on their head, given an entirely endearing quality.  But the film has a slightly tacky 70s feel to it, as the presence of Anna Karina might confirm\arouse our suspicions.  This is how rich, refined people live today, the film seems to be saying to us, this is a film that defines sexuality and culture in the modern world.  However, the film doesn´t define these things.  What it is saying is that pretentiousness, a modicum of culture, a great deal of witlessness, a great deal of showing off, outward display, define wealth, possessions and sexuality.  But they don´t.  In fact they do nothing but undermine those things.  The truth about the film and the characters is that they are symbolic of cultural deprivation, something to understand, sympathise with but certainly to distance oneself from.

In short the film is a luridly, unfunny portrayal of the worst excesses of Faßbinder, his period, redeemed by the qualities Faßbinder almost disregarded. 

Paul Murphy saw Chinese Roulette at the Arsenal cinema in Berlin.

For more Faßbinder, read Paul's reviews of Satansbraten, Despair, (A Journey into Light) and Insel der Blütigen Plantage and Die Ehe der Maria Braun.