Writer/director Rainer Werner Fassbinder turned out filmed dramas like faster than we could watch them in the early 1970s. Fassbinder's favorite actress Hanna Schygulla plays the secretary of the title character (portrayed by Margit Carstensen). Recently divorced, the lonely Petra von Kant turns to Schygulla for comfort--and, eventually, sexual gratification. The thesis set forth by Fassbinder (who was himself gay) is that the same tensions and vacillations which attended a heterosexual relationship were also present in a homosexual liaison. The film's original German title was .