Chinesisches Roulette [Chinese Roulette] (1976)

(On Cable TV, December 2022) My lack of appreciation for Chinese Roulette was a forgone conclusion the moment I started watching it. I can barely tolerate the pacing of writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder even at his best, and this isn’t him at his best. A tawdry mixture of adulterous couples (plural), dysfunctional families, a disabled child, a not-completely loaded gun, and psychological cruelty, this is a film that goes deep into pretension. Despite loaded elements, it’s seldom interesting—just mean and alien, cold when it should be hot, yet suffocating in a closed-off location with a handful of characters. By the time it ends with a gunshot (shooter and victim unknown), the film is proud of itself for setting up its elaborate charade, but fails to account for bored viewers shrugging their shoulders and asking, “So what?” There are some really clever analyses of the film available online, but they only work if you’re willing to put in the work of analyzing the film—except that this is a film that goes out of its way to discourage viewers from ever watching it in the first place.