Chinese Roulette is about a marriage. An upper class couple split up for the weekend, each has told lies to the other regarding their destination, however both end up at the same destination with lovers in tow, the schloss in the countryside. This has been carefully machinated by their young disabled daughter who has known of the affairs of her parents for many years.

The scene where Herr Christ and lover walk in on Madame Christ and lover is pretty good, there's initial shock, then they manage to dissociate from their roles and have a good chuckle about it together. Thus begins the weekend.

The daughter arrives and insists on a game of Chinese Roulette, this is an interesting little game. You get two teams of four people, the first team picks a person from the other in a secret conclave. The second team then has to guess who is the person in their team who has been chosen by asking nine questions, of the form, "if this person was a magazine, which magazine would they be?". Anyway the game gets pretty cruel if you want to play it that way, "Which would be the most fitting method of execution for the person in question" for example. You could find titillation in the game by praising someone without them knowing who you are referring to or dark joy in deeply insulting them.

The daughter has arranged it all to grind the adults down. I suppose if there is one message of the film it's that if you breed adders you shouldn't be surprised if they grow up and eat you. The couple have clearly not provided for their daughter (other than materially speaking - she has whatever she wants, chocolates dolls, pretty dresses &c).

The game is an exercise in cruelty, a couple of the answers being pretty good. However there is a lot of insecurity, everyone is wondering if the person who is being described as an apple with a worm inside it is them, furthermore the person answering the question is often blatantly prejudiced and is not understanding the person they are speaking about.

There are some pretty bizarre things going on, the butler-type Gabriel writes unsound doggerel and reads it aloud to the couples (previously only one couple at a time). There are references to a character we never see, strange complicities, unexplained relationships.

One thing you can say though is that the movie is shot brilliantly, there are some wonderful circular shots (trademark of Scorsese and Fassbinder regular collaborator Michael Ballhaus) where the camera orbits the characters, lots of shots of people reflected off glass or cut in two by doorways, some exquisite framing. Perhaps the most exquisite movie I've seen in visual terms. The score too is of a very high calibre.

I take it as a pretty mystical film, one scene that is great is the daughter sat in her bed talking to Gabriel, the camera is at floor level just behind a row of the dolls which she has arranged as a kind of adoring audience for her. You feel like one of the dolls really, it's quite strange. Certainly Fassbinder is railing against certain bourgeois modes here. The characters are isolated by their feelings of self-worth, their deceptions, their victim status, and their sharp tongues, there's no love anywhere. In every relationship in the movie I felt as if it were one possessing the other, as if a trinket.

It's nastiness all around, almost an exercise in misanthropy, another reviewer referred to it as an exercise in deception as a survival tactic. I recently titled a review of mine, "A manual on how to live", well this really is "A manual on how not to live". It's as disparaging to victims as to victimisers. One of Fassbinder's other movies was called Satan's Brew and I really think this one could have been as well .

What a revelation! Despite loving the early films of Fassbinder but becoming less keen with some of the later works, here was one I had never encountered before yet is an absolute gem. Thanks to the close working relationship with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (who would later work with Scorcese and many others) this is as visually spellbinding as it is intellectually involving. The minimal storyline revolves around four pairs of individuals thrown together, or more likely brought together by an emotionally starved young daughter for an undoing of their convenient marital set ups and possibly also their privileged position as part of the wealthy establishment within a 'new' post-war Germany. And yet because the dialogue is so believable and so biting and the surface politeness barely concealing the various levels of hatred between the staff, their masters, the lovers and the bitter daughter and her nurse, this is like eavesdropping on some awful event whilst the music of Kraftwerk plays and the camera spins.

"Chinesisches Rouelette" or "Chinese Roulette" is a West German color film from 1976, so this one has its 40th anniversary this year. The writer and director is Rainer Werner Fassbinder and he was 30 when he shot this movie less than 100 years before his untimely death. It is a bit of an unusual film for him as the character in here is a girl (on crutches) and usually his protagonists were female grown-up women. Of course, there are also grown-ups in here. Also the movie stays easily under 90 minutes, which is also not too common for Fassbinder films. Carstensen, Mira, Lommel and Spengler are all actors that worked with Fassbinder on a regular basis and they have a couple good scene s in here too. I also somewhat liked the premise of everybody playing Chinese Roulette here, but sadly it really takes quite a while until they finally do and everything before that simply is not very interesting. I struggled a bit with the characters in general. Of course, it's rarely the case that there are likable characters in Fassbinder films, but I also cared for hardly anybody in here, maybe only the girl. As a whole, I must say I was glad this film was over fairly quickly as I felt the negative outweighed the positive. It's not one of Fassbinder's best or worst, but I would not really recommend the watch. Thumbs down.