The film version of Fassbinder's play retains the theatrical structure with 4 acts, 4 actors and 4 great performances. The dialogue wins you over at once and keeps you in rapt attention hanging on every word. Leopold a persuasive self-indulgent bi-sexual restructures the lives of 3 people as he introduces them to new sexual adventures. First there's Franz a good-looking 20 year old who is contemplating marriage with his girlfriend Anna. He becomes confused about love when he has a homosexual dream which Leopold is only too happy to recreate once he has enticed the somewhat inexperienced Franz into his bed. Then there's Anna who is agreeably surprised at the change in Franz's sexual attitude. She too is overwhelmed by Leopold's advances towards her. Thirdly there's Vera - now a woman, once a man - Leopold's ex-lover perhaps more confused and disappointed than any of them. It's an entertaining romp as we watch the hand of experience "create" new lives for each of them. Leopold always in search of novelty knows what each victim is yearning for and he is only too ready to meet their desires....at least until the novelty wears off. I felt the first three acts were absolutely flawless. Act 4 with its black humour was less appealing I thought. The telephone call to his mother was quite unforgettable....."I think I'll go to Heaven because I'm young!"....and spoken with such dead pan sincerity. And the follow-up call to mother was a real gem. Yes...it's the dialogue that fascinates and holds the play together... the casting too is exceptional....and as for the old game of Ludo.... it will be so much more meaningful to me in the future!

'Water falling on burning rocks', based on an unfilmed play by Fassbinder, opens with cheesy picture postcard views of Berlin to stereotypically bright Gallic music. The image is cheerfully Fassbinderean (sic?),an image of the fake, official 'reality' that the film will seek to undermine. It is also a cinematic version of Magritte's famous painting 'Ceci n'est pas un pipe' - the static images are accompanied by matching sounds - car noises, church bells etc. - asking us to question the assumptions behind any 'image'.

So far, so Fassbinder. But it also points, from this opening, to how much this will be an Ozon film. Just as Melville filmed Cocteau's 'Les Enfants Terribles' with maximum faithfulness to the author's style, themes, motifs etc., so Ozon offers some quite extraordinary Fassbinder pastiche. He makes no attempts to 'open out' the play, because Fassbinder's best films were always 'theatrical', cramped, interior, very much concerned with ideas of performance and role playing. Ozon captures this cramped style perfectly, the unnaturally symmetrical compositons, the stylised positioning of actors, the intrusion of decor and framing, the jarring editing, the breaks in modes, from, say, intense psychodrama to a gloriously inane dance number.

But just as Melville's very faithfulness to Cocteau resulted in the ultimate Melville film, so 'Water' is pure Ozon. It's just not grimly rigorous enough to be a Fassbinder film. This is fine - we're not up to Fassbinder in the year 2000, we're more intellectually flaccid than people were in the 1970s, we cannot take such uncompromising, bitter pills without a sugar coating. This is our fault, not Ozon's, and certainly not Fassbinder's.

Fassbinder's films were often comic, but gruelling so - laughter was never a relief, but a shock of recognition, even horror. Here comedy prevents the material from ever being truly harrowing. This is not to suggest that the characters are one-dimensional, or the actors aren't up to it. Far from it. As in Fassbinder, 'psychological truth' is rejected, because it is a lie, and we get more profound insights into characters from the use of colour (e.g. a shirt matching a lamp),mirrors, lighting, mise-en-scene, and some superbly staged set-pieces, such as the remarkable final shot of Vera struggling to open the window, trying to let some air into this intolerable, fatally claustrophobic atmosphere - we see her as the camera zooms from outside, like a mime-artist trapped in an invisible structure of her own making.

But at those moments where Fassbinder is at his most intense, when the role-playing, and the easily-made speeches and the contrived situations reach a pitch, and everything stands at a naked, exposed, intolerable silence, Ozon will play some music, distancing in a formal, Fassbinder way, but also giving the audience a more comfortably ironic viewpoint, one where we are not required to suffer consequences.

But, as I say, despite the familiar Fassbinder milieu (characters, types, names, sexual traumas, even situations),this is a very French film. The difference in language, for instance, is not superficial, harsh, gutteral German seeming all the more repressive and aggressive. My reference to Cocteau wasn't entirely gratuitous, there is something of 'Les Enfants Terribles' in this Teutonic chamber-play, a lightness of form structuring this heavy drama, in this four-character psychodrama, poised exquisitely between elaborate game and emotional tragedy. Some of the filming of Franz, especially near the end, having taken poison and wearing Vera's fur coat, has a sublimely Cocteau-like grace, to go with the lighting and shifting points of view; taking the drama out of the tragicomically domestic into the realm of fantasy and myth.

After watching Water Drops on Burning Rocks, it is hard to tell exactly what flamboyant French filmmaker Francois Ozon wanted to achieve with it. On the one hand, the film is a commentary on relationships and sexuality, but on the other hand, much like Ozon's earlier Sitcom, it's easy to think that the talented young director made the film simply to shock. While I don't doubt that shocking his audience was partly his motivation for making this film, Ozon has still created a film that is more than credible on the substance front as the movie professes that, just like the water drops that land on burning rocks of it's title; relationships and love fizzle out over time. The four parties in the play also represent four different points on the sexuality spectrum; we have an old bi-sexual male, a young confused male, a straight female and a male to female transsexual, so the sexuality commentary is on track as well as the comment on relationships in general. Just like Sitcom, also, Ozon always seems keen to push the taboos of the story into the audience's face; and does a good job, as at times it's easy to feel dirty just watching this movie.

The play that the film works from is from the pen of tortured artist Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Francois Ozon seems keen to respect this fact throughout as he makes various tributes to Fassbinder's distinct style. Ozon is also keen to work in tributes to the French new wave cinema; most notably with a very strange dance scene, that, in spite of being off-cue with the rest of the movie, works very well thanks to the energy that Ozon gives the scene. It also serves as something of a relief to the disturbing and downbeat themes of the rest of the movie, and it's the only time that the underlying layer of black humour, which lies dormant for the majority of the piece (although it's definitely there),truly comes to the surface. In today's day and age, there are few filmmakers that are still capable of making a film that will leave the audience with something at the end of it; but it's safe to say that Ozon has managed it with this film. When the final credits rolled, I was unsure as to exactly what I had seen, but as time elapsed and I reflected on the movie; it's brilliance comes to light. While the movie isn't quite worthy of the term 'masterpiece'; it is certainly very good, and it represents another huge feather in the already feather-filled cap of Francois Ozon.