Peter Chatel

Quote:
Schmid’s satire on 19th-century class relations is also a thinly veiled commentary on the failure of the 1968 political revolution. Once a year, an aristocratic Austrian family holds a traditional feast at which masters and servants trade places. A troupe of actors (including cult cabaret artist Ingrid Caven) are hired to entertain the guests, performing fragments from the “cultural scrap heap”: GONE WITH THE WIND, Madame Bovary, Tennessee Williams, Swan Lake. The decadent proceedings take on a dangerous edge when the actors incite the servants to revolt against their masters-but is the Revolution also part of the act?Read More »

Allmovie synopsis:
“Radical chic” was a phenomenon of the upper classes in the late ’60s and early ’70s: liberal, socially concerned and very wealthy people would emulate the attitudes, mannerisms and style of the radicalized and revolutionary poor. They would even go so far as to socialize with revolutionaries and provide them with funding for their activities. In this drama, a similar group of bored rich people gets more involved with the radical element than they had planned, and things get out of hand.Read More »

This heady exercise in excess mixes the operatic passion of La Traviata, stylish decadence of Stroheim and Sternberg, and the macabre glee of Grand Guignol. Ingrid Caven plays Dietrich-like chanteuse stricken with CamilIe-like wasting disease. The disease seems to be arrested when a plump, wealthy young man (Peter Kern) develops a grand passion for her, but mortality raises its grinning skull again when she falls helplessly in love with another man. Jay Cocks in Time wrote, “La Paloma is a wonderful mad shotgun wedding of high camp movie mythology, bad taste, obsessive, romanticism, and impudent satire… Whatever it is, it certainly is some kind of fantastic movie.”Read More »

Quote:
When you play with clichés, you have to be very careful that they don’t backfire; the little things have a way of maiming almost everything around them.

Daniel Schmid’s “La Paloma” — which was shown last night and to be repeated tonight at the New York Film Festival — is intentionally crammed with cultural chestnuts, and also makes a heavy pass at the plots of “Camille” and “La Traviata.” Kitsch and camp collide in this storm of pity and terror and wonder, which seethes with boundless love, burning glances, and unfathomable revenge.Read More »

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As great as it is merciless, a film that inevitably precipitates violent disagreements, Fox and His Friends (the rhyming German title of which roughly translates as Fists of Freedom or, better, Might Makes Right) is the male mirror of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: a portrait of class exploitation and emotional sadomasochism amongst a group of homosexuals. Fassbinder plays Fox, a carnival entertainer who wins a lottery and thereby becomes an alluring object of desire for an antiques dealer who is on the verge of bankruptcy. The posh businessman takes the naïve carnie as his lover and introduces him to the world of Munich’s upper-crust gays, with tragic results.Read More »