Chinese Roulette

Yet another Fassbinder film whose final third elevates this to the status of near-great and makes it a significantly better film than it was starting out to be. It plays out like a murder mystery, except no one dies -- at least not physically. A man and his mistress arrive at a country estate, where he finds his wife and her lover already there. Together, they have a precocious and even spiteful young, crippled daughter as well as a few servants. The first two-thirds of the film establishes their relationships to one another and their feelings towards each other which all leads up to a spectacular game of verbal torture called chinese roulette. I'm not going to try and explain the game, that you'll have to find out for yourself, but it's a suspenseful sequence that plays out in real time like the detective walking around the room examining all of the suspects and explaining how each of them had motive and opportunity until the final revelation. This seems like the kind of film that would be fun to make -- learn an interesting and insightful game and then build a movie around it. Works for me.