Thanks Filmmuseum München, very cool! It's been years since this came onto my radar, and both Rosenbaum and a lot of online cinephiles rave about it. Considering is only 75 minutes long, and is available in good quality online, it's kinda baffling it only has 169 votes on IMDB.
The film itself is both extremely interesting and extremely uneven. Visually, it's terrific, using artificial backdrops, mirrors, and amazing framing to create a unique feel. I love the shot of them at the cinema where the screen is behind them - nothing to do with what you would find in real life, and yet the only way to let us look at two people flirting through body language while watching a film and look at the film that's being shown as well, in a parallel eroticism of 'watching two giant heads kiss'. There's also a fantastic impromptu dance scene which is extremely similar to Water Drops on Burning Rocks so now I'm wondering whether they both cribbed it from Fassbinder or Ozon just copied Rappaport.
The main storyline, such as it is, concerns two sisters who fall for the same man, same as Love Serenade which I watched the other day, and this man is also not particularly attractive and a bit of a pretentious lech. The strength of feeling between sisters is moving, bordering on seductive, but there's random murders and opera sequences as well, so something for everyone, really. It's just I'm not sure what it ultimately is, feels more like a string of genre-shifting scenes united by a sort of intense and yet detached tone, sorta like Hartley but didn't do quite as much for me. Still, there's enough ingenuity displayed here and it's often very effective as a mood piece, like in the bits mentioned above.
