Life Is All You Get (1997)

Set in the newly reunified Berlin of the 90's, "Life is All You Get" (english title)is one of those really excellent movies that tell a story of not only some interesting people, but of the time & place in which they live. Jan is struggling to get by, working in a slaughterhouse, staying with his sister, her smart & funny little girl, and her lout of a husband. A series of major upsets impacts his life: His ex-girlfriend tells him she's got AIDS, his father dies face down in a plate of ravioli, and, while accidentally caught up in a street riot, Jan knocks down a couple of guys chasing a woman (named Vera) - not knowing that they're plain-clothes cops trying to arrest her. He loses his job at this time, too, and faces a nearly impossible task of paying the heavy fine for assaulting the cops. On the bright side, he and Vera begin a relationship - haltingly, and (for him) clumsily - as they negotiate life in a city experiencing the very awkward transition between two political worlds. The characters & situations beautifully straddle the line between the wholly believable and the hysterically quirky. It's really a shame that this film didn't get an official U.S. release - it's well worth your time.

As I'm a fan of contemporary German cinema (Becker, Tykwer, Wenders), I was thrilled to find a copy of this unknown work. The first 10 minutes sets up a fantastic premise (not your usual boy-meets-girl in a coffee shop), and the next 30 minutes draws us into the odd lives of 4 mysterious, unemployed dreamers who meet each other in equally strange ways. Sounds great, right? Add to this the creative style of Wolfgang Becker and Tom Tykwer, and how can it go wrong? Well, I'm not sure how it went wrong, but it definitely did.In a classic example of "good idea, no substance", this film begins to deflate around the halfway mark with no backbone to hold it up. The interesting lives we had been led to anticipate turn out to be rather commonplace. Dialogue is so sparse it's negligible. And the plot falls back to a series of boring clichés--the kinds which you can overhear in any bar at closing time if you're patient enough to listen. It reminds me very much of Wim Wenders' early unscripted work (Paris Texas) which begins famously but thins out into oblivion. Or maybe it's like a Lenny Kravitz song that starts with a cool guitar riff but goes nowhere but boredom.I would recommend this film to fans of "mood" rather than "substance". If you are a fan of Godard, Bela Tarr, or movies where Ethan Hawke plays the lead (Reality Bites, Before Sunset), then you may enjoy this. However if you're a fan of Kieslowsky, Kubrick, Herzog or typically the filmmakers who pack a hidden message, I would suggest you pass on this one.

This is my favourite German film - if you get a chance to watch 'Goodbye Lenin' and 'Berlin Nachtgestalten' as well, you have pretty much a 360 degree panorama of life in Berlin after the Wende. Superb acting, and very funny, too. The beautiful thing about this film is that the humour, being largely visual, makes it very accessible to viewers whose German isn't so fluent.Storming performance by Ricky TomlinsonIf you only see one German film, see this one, not some pretentious tosh like 'Lola Rennt' or the uniquitous Verlorene Ehre von Katharina Blum

Leben ist eine Baustelle, titled in English as Life is All You Get, explores the aftermath of the Wende in late 90's Berlin. The story of Ossi Jan Nebel, which means 'fog,' is a mixture of discontent and pleasure, nihilism tempered with hope. As he encounters conflict after conflict, it is not any individual obstacle that is insurmountable, but the sheer number of them that threaten to crush him. Paired with Vera, the mysterious yet charming street-singer, Jan finds himself in emotional strangleholds that can only be understood through an examination of the sum total of events. How else explain leaving a dead man in the kitchen to go on a date? A great extent of the film's tensions are related to issues of sex and sexuality. Jan lives with his sister and her lover, and acts as a surrogate father/brother for his niece, whose real father is unmentioned throughout. The film opens with a street riot that appears as a video game, and Jan wanders through the maze from the bed of a woman to his temporary job at the slaughterhouse, unable to comprehend the devastation that surrounds him. This inability to comprehend, or to face, continues when Moni tells him of the threat of HIV and he refuses to get tested for what seems to be an interminable amount of time. Meanwhile, Jan's relations with Vera are conflicted and dubious: they keep secrets from each other without even trying. His roommate Buddy moves in with him and they revitalize the apartment of Jan's deceased father. Nevertheless, until the end a gloom hangs alternately over one man or the other. The Greek woman appears with all the exoticism of a far-off island and relieves some tension and loneliness simply through existing, and yet even this raises tensions, as Buddy and she grow close, but in a fit of misunderstandings, we find her in bed with Jan. Perhaps, as was discussed in class, this film plays into the crises of heterosexuality so evidenced in the earlier comedy wave. Simultaneously however, Leben ist eine Baustelle draws upon the economic hardships of the characters as much or more so as their sexual identities. It is their struggle for survival that ultimately binds them together, whether selling birds or being birds. The film does not end with any solutions, as both German and English titles attest, there is no solution. To exist is to attempt to create, and so a hybrid family skates across the ice, Vera, Jan, Buddy, Jenny, Kristina, breathing thin air and sharing their dreams.