Dir. Andreas Dresen, Germany, 2008, 100 mins, German with subtitles
Cast:
Ursula Werner, Horst Rehberg, Horst Westphal
Review by Carol Allen
All praise to writer/director Andreas Dresen for tackling the difficult and rarely touched on subject of sexual passion and older people.
Inge (Werner) is a married grandmother in her sixties, who finds herself unexpectedly caught up in a passionate affair with 76 year old Karl (Westphal). Despite the pragmatic advice of her daughter Petra ((Steffi Kühnert), who when her mother confides in her, tells her to just enjoy the experience and keep quiet about it, Inge is overcome by guilt and tells her husband (Rehlberg). Predictably that ends in disaster.
The film certainly bites the bullet as far the explicitness of the love scenes are concerned. These are not the usual youthfully perfect naked bodies we're used to seeing on screen. Dresen's actors, also to be praised for their courage, appear to have no fears about showing us their ageing bodies, saggy bits and all. Inge is no glamour puss either but an ordinary middle aged woman with scruffy unkempt hair, who earns a bit of pin money as a home seamstress, which is how she meets her lover, when he brings a pair of trousers to her for alteration. The film's very well acted and a times moving but the problem is that we never really get to the heart of Inge's motivation. Her husband seems a nice enough bloke, there appear to be no serious problems in their marriage - they too are still regularly having sex - and our understanding is not helped by the fact that the director chooses to swing straight into scenes of the lovers' sexual passion right at the start of the movie, rather than letting us get to know the characters first and how their relationship has come about. It also with one exception rather glosses over the realities of later life sex.
Dresen certainly succeeds in his aim of showing that late life passion is as unstoppable and all consuming as young love and also that the older you get in a situation such as this, when you've been with somebody for many years, the more complicated and painful the ramifications of a break up can be - although arguably that is true at forty as much as sixty or seventy, even more so when young children are involved. It should be pointed out that later in the film, it's the emotional consequences of the affair which take precedence over the physical side of Inge and Karl's relationship. This a serious movie and certainly not porn for wrinklies. But whereas for example in The Mother, another film which showed that a passionate heart still beats in an ageing breast, the main character's motives were understandable and she came out of the situation a stronger woman, in this film Inge's reasons for her actions are never clear, while the downbeat "Sturm und angst" outcome of the story negates the genuine joy the ageing lovers have found earlier in each other's company. The message of the film therefore comes over as "late life passion - it's a fact but no good will ever come of it." and I doubt if that was what Dresen intended.
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