Director: Lars Kraume (Germany). Year of Release: 2023
We start on one of those bus tours which takes in Potsdamer Platz, the television tower and various gay couples, homeless people and East Berlin traffic lights to make us aware that we are in Berlin. A man is standing at the bus stop when out of nowhere a woman rushes out and kisses him on the neck. The man is starting to get on but not old old. The woman is maybe 20 years younger. He dresses comfortably, she looks like she has spent a lot of time considering her wardrobe.
Alexander is happily pootling along with his job as a butcher. He doesn’t seem to have many obvious friends but neither does he seem to need them. He is happy in his own company. Grete, on the other hand, is a bunch of neuroses and cannot shut up. I guess that (1) we are expected to find her a “force of nature”, and (2) we are supposed to find her energetic effervescence a positive characteristic. In truth, she’s insufferable and you’d happily move house to never meet her again.
Alexander initially seems to find Grete tiring and more than a little too much. But as she follows him onto the bus, rather than tell her to fuck off and stop annoying him, he indulges her. Fair enough, he’s someone who’s not unduly rude, even when he should be, so Grete continues to bang on and on in his ear, although he doesn’t seem to particularly like her. Surprizingly, she doesn’t follow him home. Instead she googles him and turns up in his shop the next day.
Grete tells Alexander that she works in a bar whereas she really works as a secretary in a school. That’s scandalous/outrageous/exciting isn’t it? Well, sorry, but it’s none of these. Look I get the plot development bit where Grete is trying to make herself more attractive than she really is, but does anyone outside the petit bourgeois film makers really care about people who think that administrative work in a school is more embarrassing than bar work?
We all know where we’re going here. It’s a romantic comedy, and even worse, it’s a German romantic comedy. Now while I suppose that we should celebrate the fact that German romantic comedies avoid the worrying rapey parts of the worst Richard Curtis films, that doesn’t mean that they’re any good. While I’m definitely saying that all Germans lack a sense of humour – some of my best friends and all that – none of the funny ones ever ends up writing romantic comedies.
Alexander and Grete have nothing in common, which means that they are destined to end up together, right? Well, maybe, but you’ve got to give us something to work with here. Grete irritates Alexander from the moment that they first meet. At their age, it doesn’t really matter that she’s 20 years younger than him, but it feels more like he is 30 and she is 10. It is not that a relationship would be improper, it is more that it would be just weird.
What the film never even hints at is why Alexander would spend the slightest amount of time with a woman whose inability to stop talking is only matched by he lack of anything interesting to say. Some reviewers have described him as lonely but he seems perfectly happy with his own company. Pace Roddy Frame, you think he’s lonely when he’s really just alone. Now Grete is clearly lonely, but it’s the desperate sort of loneliness that makes you rapidly lose all sympathy for her.
There is one moment where Grete tries to con Alexander into paying for a flight to New Jersey so she can look for her son. How much does she need? €15,000. The film wants us to indulge her as she has no money, but why exactly does she need that much? Is she flying by Concorde or something? Staying in the poshest hotels? It’s not that there aren’t people with such extravagant budgets, but I resent being asked to feel a smidgeon of sympathy for them, let alone empathy.
I would tell you more about the film, but, honestly, I really don’t care. I don’t care what happens to Alexander, or to Grete, or to anyone who passes their way. Actually, that’s probably unfair. Alexander is a cynic, who appears to treat the world with the disdain that it deserves. Until he meets Grete and loses any sense he might have had, he’s fun. But once turns his thoughts to her, he stops using any critical facilities, and thus becomes objectively boring.
Apparently the film is based on a play called Heisenberg, and at one point Grete tentatively tries to explain the Uncertainty Principle (“if you observe it properly, you lose sight of it”). The trouble is, this has little relevance to the plot, and is uttered by a character who doesn’t show the slightest idea of what she’s talking about. But even if she did, it is a strange concept to bring such science into a film which is so full of vacuous fluff that you’re sure it’s going to fly away any minute.
Das Unschärferelation der Liebe is selling itself as a screwball comedy. Really? Katharine Hepburn should be turning in her grave at the slightest insinuation. While on the one hand, it’s great that someone has made a romantic film with people who are not young and pretty, the fact that this film is so boring and predictable only serves to reinforce the horrible presumption that older people’s lives are so boring that we really shouldn’t spend time with them.
And to think director Lars Kraume can follow the superb Das schweigende Klassenzimmer with the misjudged Der vermessene Mensch and now this. This is a sign of his current trajectory, and it’s not good. Das Unschärferelation der Liebe shows contempt for its audience in presuming that we would expect such second-rate entertainment. Then again, it will be playing in several cinemas for another week, so what do I know?
CinePhil 