Wrote on this for Reverse Shot's Great Beyond Symposium:

There is throughout Petra von Kant a sense of life as perpetual rehearsal, but as Petra’s earlier rude awakening illustrates, we cannot always decide when the curtain will rise, and we may one day wake up to find that it had risen long ago. Still, we inhabit our roles as best we can. Early on, we see Petra putting on her face as her high-society friend Sidonie (Katrin Schaake) carries on…

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms... Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another…

For a film that’s predicated on gradual seduction and about looking/painting as a conduit for or expression of love, this opts for some rather unproductive presentations of time. The sense of daily ritual is poorly evoked: scenes are given just enough narrative information so we get a sense of the plot, but there’s no feel for duration, or a sense of deepening interplay between the characters beyond what is required to signal such developments. The fireside scene should be a…