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.

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.