Chinese Roulette (1976)

(Originally released as Chinesisches Roulette)

Starring: Anna Karina, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, Ulli Lommel, Alexander Allerson, Volker Spengler

First, the Lowdown: A disabled girl manipulates her inattentive parents into an extremely uncomfortable situation.

It’s the start of the weekend and Ariane and Gerhard Christ are frantically preparing for their separate trips abroad. In their absence, their daughter Angela (who cannot walk without crutches), will be placed in the care of her governess. Angela watches the frenzy of preparation with the aloof detachment of someone who has seen the same play over and over. The Christs part company, Gerhard wishing his wife good luck in Naples as she departs. Gerhard, however, isn’t going on a trip – at least not abroad – as he picks his mistress up at the airport. The mistress, Irene, is excited to spend the weekend at the ancestral mansion Christ owns in the country – which reminds him to call the governess and tell her not to go there this weekend. Angela receives the phone call, however, sees through her father’s story about being in Oslo, and informs the governess that she wants to spend the weekend at the mansion.

Meanwhile, Gerhard and Irene have been greeted with some confusion by Kast, the housekeeper, and her son, Gabriel. To make things even more awkward, Irene and Gerhard stumble into the living room and encounter Ariane entangled sensuously on the floor with Kolbe, Gerhard’s assistant. Realizing that there’s no hiding each other’s infidelity any longer, the Christ’s laugh it off – which makes their lovers all the more uncomfortable – a discomfort that increases when Angela arrives with her governess.

There are times when I wonder if Fassbinder sees love as more of an illness than a laudable achievement. In quite a few of his movies, the cynical message is “in love, one is always used,” which is played out a little more subtly in this movie than in some of his other pieces. The Christs seem to be perfectly fine to discover each other’s affairs, almost relieved. But the extramarital lovers grow more and more ill at ease once they discover what they thought was an exhilarating and loving relationship is nothing more than something on the side to alleviate their partner’s from the dullness of routine.

At the hub of this is Angela, a disabled pre-teen who has grown weary of feeling like a burden to her parents. (She confesses to Gabriel that she knew her father’s infidelity started when she was diagnosed with her illness.) But having been shoved into the background of her parent’s lives has provided an interesting vantage point – the problem with ignoring someone is that they aren’t always ignoring you back.

In a lot of ways the movie’s climax reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. “Chinese Roulette” refers to a party game where the players are divided into teams, one team selects a person from the other, and the other team has to guess which one they chose by asking indirect questions for clues – “If the person was a car, what would they be?” As the ringleader, Angela’s talent for manipulating the emotions comes to its pinnacle here, but has a result she wasn’t expecting.

Line of the movie: “What would this person be in the Third Reich?”

Three and a half stars. It’s broccoli time!