Water Drops on Burning Rocks

Germany in the seventies. Léopold is a businessman of fifty. He meets twenty year old Franz in the street and brings him home. They talk, they drink, and Franz stays. Before long they are living together. Léopold does not disturb his order; the flat is his, the rules are his, and Franz does the housework. The relationship changes: interest gives way to demand. Then the door goes. First Franz's former fiancée arrives, then Léopold's former lover. Four people stay in the same flat and nobody leaves. François Ozon directs. Bernard Giraudeau, Malik Zidi, Ludivine Sagnier and Anna Thomson are in the cast. It is a French production. The source is a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder; he wrote it at nineteen and it was not staged in his lifetime. Bringing the play to cinema Ozon does not hide the stage structure; the film divides into four acts and takes place inside a single flat. The matter it treats is power; the sides in the relationship change but the order itself does not. There is a scene in the middle where the four dance together, and that section steps outside the narrative. The film won the Teddy award at the Berlin Film Festival. Its limit is form; the stage text looks artificial in places on screen and the characters speak like types. Who it is for: viewers who like Ozon, Fassbinder and films drawn from the stage. Who it is not for: it stays in one room, the register is cold, and the ending hard.