Chinese Roulette

A wealthy Munich industrialist, Gerhard Christ, arranges to spend a weekend at the family's country house with his mistress. His wife, Ariane, believes he is away on business and invites her own lover to the same house. The two couples come face to face, and behind the meeting lies a scheme set up by the couple's disabled daughter, Angela, who uses the confrontation to expose the adults' hypocrisy and lies. The film is a parable of the bourgeois world, its rituals and its deceptions.

Chinese Roulette was directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who also wrote the screenplay, and it followed Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in a run of films that includes Despair and The Marriage of Maria Braun. Michael Fengler and Barbet Schroeder produced, with a budget of about one million dollars. Anna Karina plays Irene Cartis and Margit Carstensen plays Ariane Christ; the cast also includes Brigitte Mira, Ulli Lommel, Alexander Allerson and Volker Spengler. Running 86 minutes, the German-French drama was released in February 1977. It holds a rating of 7.2 out of 10 on IMDb from just over five thousand votes, and 7.1 out of 10 on TMDB.