Caustic, self-pitying fashion designer Margit Carstensen is locked in a love-hate triangle with mute assistant Irm Hermann and gorgeous model Hanna Schygulla in this high-gloss, all-female melodrama, shot in claustrophobic long takes on a single, mannequin-filled set. “Fassbinder’s most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant film” (Dave Kehr).

“External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could images be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is, movement?” – Gilles Deleuze

“The more real things get, the more like myths they become.” – R.W. Fassbinder

“BITTER TEARS has perhaps the most rigorous frames-within-framing of the director’s career, particularly as fashioned by the rafters and the shelves that cordon the women off into separate squares, reducing them to isolated sculptures that appear to be ready to join all the other artifacts that have been assembled for Petra’s elaborate loft, while mirrors provide us brief, jolting X-rays-within-X-rays of their souls.” – Chuck Bowen