The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

Petra von Kant is a successful, self-assured fashion designer who rules her life and studio with a sharp tongue and an even sharper contempt for weakness. Her household is a claustrophobic stage where Marlene, her long-suffering secretary, maid and co-designer, quietly endures Petra’s emotional cruelty while keeping the affairs of the atelier running. The power in their relationship is unbalanced and ritualized, a choreography of dominance and dependency that sets the tone for everything that follows.

When Karin, a fresh-faced 23-year-old aspiring model, enters Petra’s orbit, the designer is instantly bewitched. Petra’s infatuation quickly hardens into possession: she lavishes attention and gifts, brings Karin into her home, and rearranges her life around the young woman. What begins as a glamorous romance soon reveals a darker choreography of control—Karin becomes both muse and instrument, and the tenderness that Petra craves is continually sabotaged by jealousy, insecurity and manipulation.

The film traces Petra’s emotional unraveling with cold precision, turning the intimate space of the apartment into a battleground of desire and humiliation. Marlene’s patient observance and subtle endurance complicate the drama, exposing the dependencies that sustain and destroy the central trio. Through its intense performances and stylized, theatrical mise-en-scène, the story becomes a merciless, elegiac study of love as domination, the fragility of selfhood, and the painful costs of unchecked need.