Casting

Vera is a film director who has difficulty finding the ideal cast to shoot her first film, a TV remake of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The casting process becomes the very material of Nicolas Wackerbarth’s third film. Out of this mise en abîme, he makes a film both generous and vertiginous, also initiated by television. It repeats and goes beyond Fassbinder’s film, also using a single set for his characters to interact, but adding a few differences. The really mobile camera captures the complex and perverse links between what’s happening behind the scenes and on set. Wackerbarth’s other decisive choice was to give a man – Gerwin in the film – the main part around which all the actors revolve, a part that was originally played by Hanna Schygulla in Fassbiender’s all-female film. Driven by an extremely talented cast of stage actors, Casting uses such sideways shifts to question the initial work. It uses in a different way the roundabout of sexual identities, and explores new territories in this little game of power, as an attentive observer gauging the pulse of a group, examining the effects of the economy of television, of the economy of feelings it generates, and beyond that, of resentments, desire and passion. As an actor himself (recently seen in Toni Erdmann), Wackerbarth pays close attention to the actors and their performances, he wonders about what is at stake when actors play, especially in a film mostly improvised such as this one. (NF)