It's got a certain transparency about it, because if the clothes weren't so fashionable, so slick, there would be no transparency at all. Often women hide behind a glossy exterior of fashion and there's more to people than this superficiality.
Penny Bainbridge, Producer,
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
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17-28 May, 1988, Free Theatre, The Arts Centre
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the famous German filmmaker was also a theatre director and playwright. He wrote The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as a play and later made a film of it.
Petra von Kant is a fashion designer who also wants to redesign her life on aesthetic principles. As her experience with marriage and the male world is ugly and devastating she turns to Lesbian love only to find that beauty and love have to be paid for as much as success and financial independence. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant fluctuates from soap opera and melodrama to radical criticism of patriarchal society and the male principle. The play is caught in a mixture of Kitsch and Art, as Petra is caught between the desire for love and beauty and the exploitation of her sisters. The production sets the play in New Zealand, a New Zealand that is more a tatty capitalist dream than reality. Petra von Kant's dresses will be modelled in a fashion show and are on sale in the interval and at the end of the play. This is the first production coming out of a cooperation of the Free Theatre with the newly established University Drama Programme. ReviewsThe Theatrical equivalent of easy-listening music, perhaps.... A production engaging as a pageant, but still lacking. Like an Easter egg; tasty but hollow under the lovely tinfoil. A steady diet of it would be unhealthy. ... mostly it sags and lags.... points are bludgeoned home and the effect is largely soporific. ...the tedium of these proceedings is not redeemed.... Fassbinder's decadent Western European sensibility just doesn't wash in deepest Fendalton.... self-contradictory, repititious nonsense.... an interpretation which works against the play.... not credible at all.... dilettantism with pretensions, over-priced and under-done. ArticlesDramatic Students
Margaret McLachlan, CANTA Vol. 58 No. 10, 30 May 1988 The bitter tears of Petra von Kant publication unspecified 
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Any life story that deals with a relationship or whatever is a melodrama and, for this reason, I think melodrama films are correct films. The American method of making them, however, left the audience with emotions and nothing else. I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analysing what he is feeling. With Brecht you see the emotions and you reflect upon them as you witness them but you never feel them. That's my interpretation and I think I go farther that he did in that I let the audience feel and think. 
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