Review: Chinese Roulette

The film is a rigorous illumination of deception as a survival tactic.

Chinese Roulette
Photo: New Yorker Films

Gerhard Christ (Alexander Allerson) takes his mistress. Irene (Anna Karina), to his country home, where he discovers his wife, Ariane (Margit Carstensen), engaged in her own romantic entanglement with his business partner, Kolbe (Ulli Lommel). Gerhard and Ariane’s disabled, doll-obsessed daughter, Angela (Andrea Schober), contrives both this violent collision and the subsequent game of Chinese roulette that positions one of the house’s inhabitants as the grand executioner to the young girl’s grand inquisitor. One of writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s more obscure works, Chinese Roulette—because words, not bullets, do most of the damage here—is also one of his towering achievements: a rigorous illumination of deception as a survival tactic, and a vicious indictment of victimhood, martyrdom, and the games people will play in order to destroy one other.

Fassbinder’s camera moves constantly in all directions as if attached to a system of pulleys, following characters as they walk, stop, shift alliances, and subsequently fracture the frame using the reflective devices that clutter the film’s mise-en-scène. And because his ever-gliding camera takes on the metaphoric role of a pistol aiming randomly at its parasitic characters, the film could easily have been called Russian Roulette. It’s best to understand this alienating alientating as such or the film’s heightened self-awareness may prove suffocating. A haunting shot of the house’s pastoral exterior literally evokes the decay of the film’s modern family, but that the movement is timed to Angela’s engagement of a poem by the self-devouring Arthur Rimbaud, Chinese Roulette also concerns the decay of the human ego.

As Angela seemingly holds an entire household in the grip of her hand, Fassbinder repeatedly questions the various power dynamics at work here. The actual game of Chinese roulette that the characters play in the third act allows them to destroy each other with words without ever addressing each other by name. “Eavesdroppers often here the false truth,” says the self-righteous Angela to the goofy housemaid’s son. There are variously disabled persons in the film, and one of its strange pleasures is watching which group comes out on top: the emotionally or physically handicapped. Angela likens her mother to a concentration camp commander by film’s end and Ariane unconsciously wills herself into the role soon after. Everyone’s a victim of deception and the nasty rituals of revenge these lies provoke. That there are losses on all sides suggests that no one ever wins in similar such games of Chinese roulette.

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Score: 
 Cast: Anna Karina, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, Ulli Lommel, Volker Spengler, Alexander Allerson, Andrea Schober, Macha Méril  Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder  Screenwriter: Rainer Werner Fassbinder  Distributor: New Yorker Films  Running Time: 82 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1976  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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