Cloud 9

Inge is sixty-seven and has been married to the same man for thirty years. Working as a seamstress, she meets Karl, who is in his seventies, and an interest she did not expect turns into an affair. Inge does not choose to hide it; she tells her husband. From there the film offers neither lightness nor a story of punishment, only a look at how three people fail to carry the situation. What was most talked about when Andreas Dresen's film appeared were the explicit sex scenes performed by actors in their sixties and seventies; cinema almost never shows that age this way, which is what enlarged the argument. But the subject is not sex so much as how a desire arriving late pulls apart a life already built. Ursula Werner plays the part without shame and without apology. The camera is handheld and the dialogue largely improvised.