A media escalera

The story of the film is uncomplicated, but very realistic. This is also helped a lot by the actors who improvised the whole dialogues (which gives them the nice charme of the "Didi & Stulle" comics, including the dialect). In the beginning this is very funny, but you stop laughing when you notice that what you are watching is like real life.

This film tells a story that hadn't been written (or maybe on half a page) but was almost entirely improvised by the fabulous cast. Great emotions on the entire spectrum from love, joy, desire, deceipt, friendship, betrayal, anger, hopelessness, emptiness...all but hatred. Great gags along the way and surprising use of mockumentary elements when the characters are suddenly interviewed between the actions. Astonishing achievement.

While the quality of the film is uneven, the overall experiment makes the film worth watching. Director Andreas Dresen (trained in the former East Germany), who often works with these actors, decided to make a film without a script (needless to say, he had some difficulty gaining funding!) A dramaturg worked to ensure narrative consistency, and the small film team met to plan the scenes for the next day. The focus becomes a focus on the characters and their experience of a place we hear little about - the town of Frankfurt on the Oder, which is located deep in the former East Germany on the Polish border. By the way - the film often is compared to Dogme95, with good reason. However, Dresen, in interviews, rejects the restrictive nature of the Dogme95 guidelines.

I'm very fond of this movie. The authenticity of the actors, the very light and playful use of humor an subtle gags and the fact, that although they were doing it on a very low budget, you're not going to be sick by the way they handle the camera makes this so absolutely enjoyable. its setting in frankfurt/oder is also something very different even though films on the soil of the ex-gdr are on the increase. i haven't seen such a film since 'Männer' which is a few decades ago.

this movie tells a common story like no other. watch it in german.

I was not sure what sort of film I was going to watch, when I was entering the movie theater, but I liked Halbe Treppe, although it was VERY influenced by Scandinavian Dogma-releases and therefore very hyped in recent German press releases. The story itself is not that much complex: two couples, of the one the man and of the other the woman become unfaithful... But the gags in-between are terrific. There is this running gag on the 17 hippies playing music in front of the snack box, or the other one concerning Britney Spears, whose music is always running in the background, when scenes were shot at the local radio station. Many devices of the Dogma manifesto were used in this film: no artificial setting, laymen-acting, hand camera a.s.o., but the splendour of a "Idioterne" (Lars von Trier, 1998) or "Festen" (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998) is not achieved. Nevertheless, I liked the movie and was surprised, since most recent German releases bored me a lot. 8* (out of 10*)