François Ozon owes a thing or 12 to the great German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose work still blazes with cruel fire. Ozon came to the Berlin Film Festival for the first time with Water Drops On Burning Rocks (2000), a cheekily sinister adaptation of an obscure Fassbinder play. This year’s curtain-raiser, the French director’s Peter von Kant, is that riskiest of propositions: a Fassbinder remake, with Ozon supplying his own mischievous take on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, which Fassbinder wrote for the stage before adapting as his deathless 1972 film of that name.

That scabrous masterpiece about a lesbian love triangle was inspired by Fassbinder’s relationship with a bisexual muse, Günther Kaufmann, one of a long roster of actors he clawed into his possession. In the pathetically smitten title character, critics have long spotted a self-portrait. Ozon has taken things one step further, by switching Petra to Peter and casting a mustachioed Denis Ménochet, whose pig-farmer stoutness gives him more than a glancing resemblance to RWF himself.

Not this time a costume designer but a dauntingly prolific filmmaker with a voracious sex drive, Peter begins the film languishing, in 1972 Cologne, in a grand open-plan apartment we will hardly ever leave. Guests come and go, but the only constant is Karl (Stefan Crepon), an uptight manservant Peter emotionally abuses, who flits around neurotically at his beck and call while never uttering a word.

First the gossipy actress Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani, a campy hoot) comes to visit, and then she buzzes up Amir (the magnetic Khalil Ben Gharbia), a dimpled, curly-haired young ingénue, to whom Peter instantly attaches himself like a clam. Noisily slurped oysters with champagne are next on the menu; before long the two are passionately embroiled. It only takes a gap of eight months, when the second act kicks in, for Amir to have turned into an insolent plaything, lolling in bed with little but amused contempt for his lover, and no compunctions about flaunting his unfaithful nights on the town to inflict maximum agony.

All the delusion, pain, and wild absurdity of amorous obsession were Fassbinder’s subjects; frequently Ozon’s, too. The actors, led by an unrestrained Ménochet, dish out a much more emotionally full-throated read on what cinephiles consider a sacred text.