AllMovie

Francois Ozon's adaptation of an early Rainer Werner Fassbinder play is a distanced chamber piece about the impossibility of human relationships. Set entirely within the confines of an apartment and populated by a meager cast of four, the movie has a theatrical feel -- it's at once stylized and intimate. As expected, the movie shares the same thematic obsessions as Fassbinder's cinema. Charting the romantic travails of its four characters, Water Drops on Burning Rocks portrays a world where relationships -- both hetero- and homosexual -- are doomed to failure and repetition. Ozon shows the diagram of human love affairs to be little more than a hierarchy of domineering abusers and submissive victims, with victims eagerly taking on the dominant role when given the opportunity. The movie has an undercurrent of absurdist humor, but its laughs are muffled for the most part, with the exception being an out-of-left-field dance number that injects some needed energy into the dour, claustrophobic story. Beautifully structured and meticulously filmed, Water Drops on Burning Rocks is clearly the work of an intelligent filmmaker -- albeit one whose misanthropic worldview may be off-putting to some viewers.