I went into the premiere of this German movie without too many expectations. Although the German movie scenery has improved in recent years, commercially oriented comedies are still too often disappointing for people who want to be entertained, but not fooled intellectually. Despite (or maybe because?) of the directorś choice to locate the main plot of this movie near his hometown on the Swabian Alb (and contrasting this countryside idyll several times with business life in the Chinese mega-city of Shanghai), the central question of the film is of rather German-wide oder even European-wide relevance: how can the (softened?) business successors of (ambivalently hardened by personal war experience) postwar founder-generation of family entrepreneurs cope with the fact that economic globalization makes obsolete more and more well-established industrially patented inventions? Although the movie is dominated by a rather comedy-like narrative style with 89-year-old actor Walter Schultheiss contributing many funny scenes as pre-demented patriarch, there are also several sequences where not only (historically) sensitive people get a chance to drop some tears or at least get thought-provoking impulses for the future of good old Europe in general and his/her home town in particular. In my opinion a must-watch not only for people (still) working in Southern German family businesses, but for all people interested in the (post)war past of Germany and possible futures of our prosperity!
