Sadly Over-hyped

Perfect cast and a good story

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This story that begins with a young man being seduced by an older man turns into a sexual free-for-all when the men are joined by previous female lovers (well, one of the women was male but had a sex change that turned him into the beautiful Anna Thomson). A better title might have been, "The Varieties of Sexual Experience." Even with the nudity on display (both male and female) and the sex scenes, I found myself at a total emotional remove. For starters I could not believe for a second the relationship between the older Leo and the younger Franz. I never felt that there was any true chemistry between them and the plot depends heavily on your believing that.The use of color and interesting camera work does add value--in fact I might have enjoyed this movie better with the sound off. The many sights of Ludivine Sagnier's naked body will have certain appeal to a large segment of the viewers.The final act soars into the surreal; some may find it humorous, but I found it simply absurd. Fortunately for me this film was only eighty minutes long.

The many works of the late German playwright Rainer Werner Fassbinder are usually very German: solid, serious, and set in an unsmiling German social environment.French director Francois Ozon managed the impossible by presenting such a Fassbinder-play in a French spirit. By successfully combining its serious German plot with a pleasant, easily digestible French touch.Apart from this remarkable feature, 'Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brulantes' (= French for 'drops of water on burning rocks') stands out for its excellent acting.This really is all there is to comment on this film. It's just good. Very good.

Francois Ozon's film version of Fassbinder's play is like another more slightly surreal, very blackly comic version of "The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant", played out this time mostly by men. Fifty year old Leo picks up twenty year old Franz and brings him home for the night. Franz stays, becoming his lover, his houseboy but mostly his slave. There are only two other characters in this slight, stage-bound piece; Anna, Franz's vacuous former girlfriend and Vera, Leo's former transsexual lover.Fundamentally it's about love, of the destructive, unwholesome kind maybe, but love nevertheless. Whatever hold Leo has over Franz, (and Vera), they both love him though it could hardly be said that it is reciprocated. Leo is very much the master and everyone else is his slave. Whether he is capable of love is debatable.Ozon makes the piece both erotic and humorous but it is never quite as touching as it ought to be. All four players give good performances with Malik Zidi quietly outstanding as the boy.

From its opening sequence, rife with enormous sexual tension, to its devastating last scene in which amidst a shocking tragedy, one man continues to destroy the lives of those whom he loves, WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS never once leaves the scenario of the bachelor pad based in the Berlin of the 1970s. What will take place during the following 90 minutes will be confined in this chic but ultimately emotionally scarred place, and according to Fassbinder -- the man who penned this previously unproduced play about sexual politics between men and women -- love and cruelty go hand in hand.Leopold (Bernard Giraudeau, very imposing, suave and masculine), a 50 year old business man who seems to be the alter-ego of Fassbinder himself, has picked up a shy 19 year old Franz (Malik Zidi) and has invited him back to his pad. Both initiate a verbal game of seduction that has its objective clear, but due to its language and the two men's interaction with each other is the movie's highlight of escalating eroticism even when it uses time-worn techniques as "Have you ever slept with a man?" as the question Leopold asks Franz after they have reminisced about the women they have been involved with. If anything, the scene, charged as it is, deflates noticeably when Act One concludes with Franz lying naked in bed in an unerotic pose, as Leopold becomes his fantasy man dressed in a trench-coat and fedora to the sounds of a music box.Act Two brings the story some time later and already it seems like both Franz and Leopold have started to go into the irritations and rough spots that can happen in any relationship fraught with impulsiveness in lieu of sensibility. Franz is clearly in wife mode -- his hair now combed to resemble a style common for women at the time and wearing emasculating lederhosen --, and Leopold is clearly a tyrant in his own place and not about to change for the whims of this young man whom he likes in bed, but nowhere else. After an argument, they switch sexual roles, Leopold obviously uncomfortable in the submissive position, as Franz walks in, decked in the same trench-coat and fedora.Act Three brings more tension: Franz girlfriend Anna (Ludivine Sagnier), and a mysterious woman who later identifies herself as Leopold's ex-girlfriend Vera (Anna Thomson) begin to show up. Complications ensue: Anna wants Franz to marry her and it doesn't shock her that he's been in a bad relationship with another man. Franz, as a matter of fact, is about to take charge when somehow he's lured back in with deadly consequences, as he learns of Leopold's penchant of manipulating those whom he "loves" from Vera's own tragic story: she'd been a man once, and so in love with him she had allowed her masculinity to be reduced to nothing if it meant pleasing the man she (he) loved.Despite being Ozon's movie, this is all Fassbinder down to the heavy-handedness of its ending. The only places where the movie becomes more Ozon's is in the handling of the quartet in a dance sequence reminiscent of the first musical number in 8 FEMMES and Ozon's own visual style -- which would become a trademark for his later films. WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS is an odd little movie, talky with elements of the surreal -- Leopold's overpowering masculinity seduces Anna and Vera into a threesome, although Anna is clearly set to be his next victim, and Franz fantasizes of shooting Leopold through the head. If the last sequence falls to pieces, it's more the vision of a young writer and soon-to-be filmmaker who somehow seemed to have wanted to give some gravitas to his first play.