303

Jule, a biology student, finds out she is pregnant and sets off in an old camper van to tell her boyfriend in Portugal. She picks up Jan on the way, who has business of his own in Spain, finding a father he has never met. For the next two hours the two of them talk. The film refuses to fold this into a romantic comedy. The conversations are genuine arguments: whether human nature is selfish, whether capitalism is inevitable, whether love is a biological trick. Hans Weingartner wrote the script to carry those debates, and Mala Emde and Anton Spieker deliver them as thinking rather than as recitation. The model of the van gives the film its title: a Mercedes 303. It screened in the Generation section at the Berlin film festival in 2018. Its flaws: at two and three quarter hours it drags, the landscape sequences repeat, and some of the debate stays at the level of student conversation. Who it is for: viewers who like road films that run on talk. Who it is not for: anyone wanting incident and pace.