Rabbit Without Ears

Ludo, a tabloid reporter chasing celebrities, gatecrashes a wedding and causes enough damage that a court sentences him to three hundred hours of community service. He will serve it at a nursery. The woman running the nursery turns out to be a girl he bullied as a child. The film is not interested in romantic comedy. It is interested in the tabloid trade itself: Ludo makes a living selling people's private lives, and the film corners him precisely through that job. The passages with the children are what change him. The form is German mainstream comedy: Berlin, bright images, fast dialogue and familiar shapes. Til Schweiger wrote, directed and starred. The film was an extraordinary box-office success in Germany, the most watched domestic production of its year, and produced two sequels. It made Schweiger one of the biggest ticket sellers in German cinema. Nora Tschirner plays the nursery manager and Jürgen Vogel his friend. Who it is for: viewers who like German popular comedy and familiar romantic structures. Who it is not for: anyone after originality. The story follows the Hollywood template almost exactly and some of the humour stays coarse.