Love in Thoughts

Paul is a middle-class student who writes poetry. His friend Günther is rich and unstable. They spend four days at a summer house outside Berlin with Günther's sister Hilde: alcohol, cigarettes, night walks, and a constantly shifting account of who loves whom. Günther and Paul make a pact; the moment love fails them, they will end their lives. By the end of the weekend two people are dead. Achim von Borries's film is based on the Steglitz student tragedy that took place in Berlin in 1927. The narrative builds the event not as a crime story but as the outcome of youth mistaking its own feeling for something absolute. The visual register carries the mix of abundance and collapse particular to the end of the Weimar years. Daniel Brühl plays Paul, August Diehl plays Günther, and Anna Maria Mühe plays Hilde. The film screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2004. Who it's for: Viewers who like Weimar-era drama, youth tragedies drawn from real events, and German cinema. Who it's not for: The characters are deliberately self-regarding, and the narrative does not entirely avoid the risk of aestheticising suicide.