In theory, based on their individual careers, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and François Ozon should not blend together as incredibly as they do in practice. They’re both artists that represent different styles and eras of filmmaking, with any sense of significant overlap between them (outside of Ozon’s outward admiration for the esteemed German filmmaker) being very abstract, at least at a cursory glance – despite similar subject matter, they’re not normally filmmakers spoken about in the same sentence all that often outside of mentioning how one set the foundation for the other in terms of provocative, queer-coded cinema. However, once you start to give it some thought, you realize what a perfect match they are – despite working in completely different decades, they had many qualities in common, with Ozon often stating that he idolizes Fassbinder, and finds him a source of constant inspiration. Prior to his death, Fassbinder wrote a play entitled, Tropfen auf heisse Steine, which he produced for the stage, but never managed to bring to the screen. Ozon, using his newly-minted platform as one of the most exciting new voices in French cinema, took the opportunity to breathe life into this play, turning it into Water Drops on Burning Rocks (French: Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes), a deceptive and brilliant erotic dark comedy that serves to be the perfect collision between two radically distinct voices, with Fassbinder’s eccentric exploration of human sexuality, and Ozon’s penchant for unconventional portrayals of complex romance, making for a truly captivating piece of contemporary cinema. Perhaps this isn’t exactly the film version of his play that Fassbinder may have intended, but crediting him as the sole influence behind it is misguided, since every frame is filled with the kind of perfectly-calibrated melodrama that Ozon has perfected throughout his career, making for a truly exceptional dark comedy that plays on our most intrinsic emotions (or rather relishes in manipulating them), and keeps us engaged, even when we start to feel uncomfortable – and as we’ve seen many times before, this kind of disquieting deception is often one of the strongest aspects of Ozon’s filmmaking, which is employed perfectly here.

Water Drops on Burning Rocks is a film told in four distinct acts, each one of them revealing more about the quartet of central characters. We start with two of them one pleasant evening, with their chance encounter (and subsequent romancing) resulting in six months of psychosexual manipulation, in which the other two characters eventually weave their way into the narrative, leaving their own indelible impression on the story. Ozon frames this premise, which is remarkably simple in theory, with his distinct tongue-in-cheek humour that doesn’t avoid the gravity of these situations, but still allows it to be entertaining, rather than heavy-handed, hinting at the complexities rather than overtly fixating on them. There’s very little doubt that Fassbinder’s version would’ve been a much more sobering work of fiction, which only makes the difference between the two more noticeable, while still showing how perfectly their two authorial voices could work together when done well. This film is a brutal deconstruction of romance and sexuality, told from the perspective of four characters, each one of them more deranged than the last, in both their perverse desires, and their innermost insecurities that manifest in unexpected ways, which makes the gradual overlap between their stories all the more bewildering. Not a single one of these characters seems to know exactly what they want, other than to be the one in power – and Ozon, who is certainly not a stranger to this particular brand of libertine sexuality, takes every opportunity to get beneath the skins of these characters, looking at them with an increasingly scrutinous perspective, and encouraging the viewer to do the same, but only to the point where we’re actively observing, rather than asserting judgment on these characters. It’s a fascinating experiment in deconstructing the format of a traditional erotic story, with Ozon’s tendency towards darkly comical situations being utilized particularly well, elevating most of these situations from awkward to hauntingly bizarre.

In an artistic landscape preoccupied with classification, Water Drops on Burning Rocks dares to be one of the rare instances of a film actively avoiding categorization as a deliberate choice. Fassbinder was known for cleverly surpassing conventions, blending together melodrama, psychological thriller and dark comedy in most of his films, some of them being more overt than others. Ozon, inheriting many of the same tendencies, uses his platform to bring this warped version of a romantic comedy to the screen. He’s assisted by the four actors that form the cast of the film, each one of them unique and captivating in their own way. The de facto leads of the film are Bernard Giraudeau and Malik Zidi, who play the two men whose chance encounter lead to a strange May–December romance, where the oddity isn’t their age difference, but rather that neither of them seems to be in love with their partner, and instead simply engaging in a twisted, perverted relationship built on every except romance. When the film jumps forward to six months after their initial meeting, they’re reduced to a bickering couple that show very little sign of attraction to one another, to the point where outsiders would mistake it for a manipulative servant-master relationship. This is the first hint towards the fact that Water Drops on Burning Rocks is not a film about romance, but rather psychosexual manipulation, where someone uses their power and influence to entrap another into an inescapable relationship, where the only way out is through demise. It is certainly analogous to the director’s brand of filmmaking to have difficult subject matter (such as attempted suicide, drug addiction and sexual violence) presented in a vaguely comedic way – but instead of eliciting laughter, Ozon is instead using this as a tool to establish an unsettling atmosphere, so that when Ludivine Sagnier and Anna Thomson enter the film, as the two former love-interests of the main characters, the mood has been set for even more disconcerting manipulation, which Ozon presents with such precision, we don’t even realize how disturbing it is until we’re in the midst of it.

Ozon is navigating a very narrow boundary between masterful provocation and outright exploitation with Water Drops on Burning Rocks in both the overall storyline, and the themes that underpin it, working tirelessly to stay true to the text and evoke the dark underlying subject matter, but without entirely surrendering to the darker aspects of the story. There’s a great deal of subtext that grows increasingly obvious as the film progresses, which showcases the dark and manipulative nature of these characters – this is certainly the work of Fassbinder, whose misanthropic worldview often collided with his fascination with human behaviour – and the idea of a newly-formed homosexual couple, one where there is more a forced companionship as opposed to any sense of attraction, is disrupted by the arrival of a couple of women who only complicate the dynamic even more, not necessarily in a way that could be considered villainous (in fact, we’re more likely to empathize with Anna and Véra, as they’re arguably the real victims of the manipulation at the core of this relationship). So much of Water Drops on Burning Rocks centres on the raw, visceral expression of sexuality, which serves as an allegory for another kind of lust, that of power and dominance (this is often referenced in the peculiar recurring motif of the grey overcoat, which signifies the “dominant” force in each sexual encounter), which is the most twisted part of the entire film, since there is a genuine sense of malice underpinning the entire story, where the concept of pure love is replaced with a grotesque representation of using the vulnerabilities of one person to fuel the perverted desires of another. It’s a difficult concept to describe in theory, and so much of Water Drops on Burning Rocks relies on the evocative use of a particular tone and visual aesthetic to convey this message – but it becomes increasingly more upsetting as we venture further into the narrative, and start to see the layers of complex gradually eroding, until we’re left with nothing but the most disturbing psychosexual terror imaginable, all framed as a bleak dark comedy.

Knowing exactly what to think and feel about what we’re seeing on screen is futile, since Water Drops on Burning Rocks is such a bewildering film, it seems as if it was designed to intentionally frustrate and disturb in tandem. Ozon uses his unique talents to tell this story, merging with the style of one of his absolute cinematic idols, and pulling together the wildly disparate narrative strands to tell a poignant and haunting story that takes place at the uncomfortable intersection between sexual desire and the lust for manipulation and power. It isn’t one of Ozon’s more well-known films, mainly because it tends to be considered more of a novelty, insofar as he was working from a script written by a director he is often cited as being a spiritual descendent of, thus distancing it from the particular style Ozon came to be known for in later years. However, keen devotees of the work of both directors will be able to tell exactly where Fassbinder ends and Ozon begins, with the delineation being clear but still very fluid. This is certainly one of the best instances of two artists’ styles overlapping, where the younger of the two borrows and adapts, rather than outright stealing, from his inspiration, and using it to construct a version of the world Fassbinder envisioned through his own unique lens. It’s a puzzling film, and it doesn’t always give us the resolution we perhaps believe we deserve, often operating as a more abstract work of psychologically charged erotic fiction. However, paying attention rewards us with a deep and unflinching glimpse into the lives of these characters (played excellently by a quartet of incredible actors), as they weave into each other’s narratives, bringing out the dark secrets that underpin these otherwise ordinary individuals, proving the taut adage that judging a book by its cover isn’t only foolish, it can sometimes become quite dangerous, especially when we don’t quite anticipate the contents within it, since we might not like what we find.