The magic of true cinema is that it can take two people, and two elements in it to make a film a small masterpiece. The two elements in it are a Bessie Smith Song and a clip from an old Dreyer film that continues to haunt the amazing soundtrack. The two actors named Alexander and Alex are fairly new to cinema and yet they held my close attention for the full one hour and just under a half and I was not bored with them for a moment. I may have blinked but I did not see another person on the screen, and the drab and to me uninspiring Berlin setting and equally uninspiring rooms in it did not prevent me from being totally inspired about what I saw. I saw life with a big L and the routines of it; the attempts at connecting through sexuality and conversation and the feeling that these two would continue a long time after the camera stopped filming. There was love on the screen. Perhaps not love that will last as in conventional film, but a valiant attempt for it to do so. The sexuality is very explicit, but then so is the ability to converse and to share experiences that they have had and hope to have in the future. Both are young and in some sort of way dreamers, and there is one scene of possible dread and failure in their watching a fairly morbid Dreyer scene on a television set. It seems an improbable choice of film to watch, but then real life is and this slight dread recurs throughout the soundtrack. I felt a sort of dread along with it that they might drift apart, and the film refuses to tell me, again like life. I use this word 'life' quite seriously, because you seldom see it in such clarity in what we call entertainment, or even in what we quite often call wrongly 'art' cinema. A frontier of sorts was crossed in this film that deserves attention, and I see by the ratings and the few that have seen it, that it has received little. In some ways it reminded me of Eustache's film, 'La maman et la putain'. It has that sort of looking and observing and valuing detail we often omit in cinema. That was a heterosexual film and had a cult following. This is its opposite; a homosexual film that should have an equal following. It is real and totally authentic. No fake anywhere in sight. I urge viewers to track it down. A well deserved 10.
