Berlin Flashback: Hanna Schygulla’s Golden Moment

Thomas Wolfe may have popularized the phrase “You can’t go home again,” but don’t tell that to Hanna Schygulla, who staged a triumphant return to the Berlin International Film Festival in 2010 to receive an honorary Golden Bear. The actress — longtime muse to bad-boy director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with whom she collaborated on 23 films and TV shows, in the process giving birth to the New German Cinema of the ’60s and ’70s — was first recognized by the festival in 1979.

That year, she was awarded the Silver Bear for best actress in Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, in which she starred as a new wife who must struggle to survive in post-World War II Berlin when her husband is imprisoned. In welcoming her back in 2010, then-festival director Dieter Kosslick testified, “Hanna Schygulla’s name is inseparably connected with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films.”

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Complimenting her at the time, an interviewer from Faz.net observed, “Honors for a life’s work always confirm that something is well rounded.” Schygulla, then 66 and living in Paris, jokingly replied, “Why, surely. My physical appearance is more rounded off,” adding, “The rest continues to evolve, in growing rings, to paraphrase Rilke. There’s lots to come, at least I hope so.”

Her current visit to the festival more than fulfills that prediction — even as the shadow of Fassbinder still hovers over her. Her latest project is François Ozon’s Peter von Kant, the opening night film. Ozon has often cited Fassbinder as an inspiration, and the French filmmaker’s new feature is described as a loose reworking of Fassbinder’s 1972 melodrama The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, in which a young Schygulla appeared as an aspiring model drawn into a lesbian affair with a fashion designer played by Margit Carstensen.

This time around, though, Ozon is performing a gender swap, with Carstensen’s Petra becoming a film director named Peter, played by Inglourious Basterds actor Denis Ménochet, and Schygulla’s aspiring model morphing into an acting hopeful named Amir, played by Khalil Ben Gharbia. Rounding out the cast and adding their own undeniable star power are Isabelle Adjani and the indefatigable Schygulla, now 78, for whom her newest film finds her coming full circle.

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