Three

A film about relationships set in Berlin. Hanna and Simon have been together for twenty years. They are not married, have no children, and there is a long silence between them. Hanna works at an arts institution. She chairs discussion programmes and comes home late. Simon is an engineer. His mother is dying and in the same week he is given a diagnosis. Separately, each meets Adam. He is a stem cell researcher; someone who says plainly what he does and deceives nobody. Hanna meets him at a conference. Simon meets him at a swimming pool. Both begin a relationship and neither says so at home. From there the film settles into a structure of three. The same man, the same house, separate times, and two stories that never cross. What the narrative is interested in is not deception but change: the film does not build it as a crisis; it shows that two people in their forties can still change. The form is restless. The screen splits, choral pieces cut in, text is laid over the image, and scientific presentations mix into the narrative. The line about death is its most solid. Simon's scenes with his mother have a plainness entirely different from the rest. The ending is openly utopian. The narrative punishes nobody, and that choice is what it was most criticised for. Sophie Rois, Sebastian Schipper and Devid Striesow are in the cast. Tom Tykwer wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes formal play and unconventional films about relationships. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to attach to the characters; the narrative keeps cutting in and setting a distance.