Berlin Blues

October 1989, West Berlin. The SO 36 part of Kreuzberg is walled on three sides; nobody comes here and those here go nowhere. Frank works in a bar. He is about to turn thirty and everyone calls him Herr Lehmann, which feels to him like being treated as old. His days are fixed: he goes to the bar, drinks, talks to his friend Karl and goes home. He meets a cook and a relationship begins. His parents come to visit. Karl's condition deteriorates. Then 9 November arrives and nobody understands what has happened. Leander Haußmann directs. Christian Ulmen plays Frank; Katja Danowski and Detlev Buck are in the cast. The source is Sven Regener's novel; the writer adapted it himself. Regener is also a member of a band and had lived in that milieu before writing the novel. Haußmann had earlier made a film set in East Berlin; this one tells the same period from the western side. The matter it treats is indifference; the fall of the wall is not at the centre but stands in the background as an event. Its humour rests on dialogue and the talk comes from the novel. Kreuzberg as it then was is built in detail; the bars, the rents and the daily order are the narrative's material. Its limit is structure; the plot is loose and the narrative arrives nowhere. Who it is for: viewers who like German comedy and stories of the wall years. Who it is not for: there is little event, the humour local, and the historical moment stays in the background.