This film of a true story from 1927 Berlin is a good representation of Weimar Republic youth - or so people would claim. A wealthy young man befriends a fellow rebel from his Steglitz neighborhood school - only the brilliant and poetic friend is poor. Both teenagers are truants, given to drunkenness, and especially our poor little rich boy is melancholy, cynical and bisexual. His ambivalence in his sexual tendencies drives him to a suicidal madness, knowing how brief a true moment of love can be. He worries constantly that the rest of his life - after that perfect love moment - will be one long punishment, the fact of living with the memory that can never be replicated. Thus in his depressive contemplation, he comes to the conclusion that he must kill himself after that moment, when it comes, and he gets his poor sidekick to sign a pact with him on this.
The true story of this pact and its consequences, one lovely summer night in the parents' weekend summer house, with one murder and one suicide, is naturally disturbing and depressing to viewers. Reading other comments on the net, one could be inclined to think this film a loser. Perhaps also, that it happened so long ago, and takes place in Germany, makes the impact of their youthful misguidance seem passe. Yet in its time, the two deeds and the one survivor's trial (followed by only three weeks in prison!) rocked Germany, and the news went around the world as evidence of 1920's disaffected and lost youth.
In German, the incident was called the Steglitzer Schulertragoedie (the Steglitz student tragedy), and the book written later by the young poet/survivor was a big seller: Die Mietskaserne (the rented barracks). The new Nazi government banned the book as "unGerman" and burned it. The author skedaddled and wrote only by penname. Many commentators of the time, in many countries, considered that the licentiousness and wickedness of 1920's Berlin led to these actions.
As for the film, the locations are beautiful, out on a lake in the woods of Berlin, with the beautiful sister as a love object, flirtatious, drunk and hedonistic, leading on all men present. The rich boy is shown as a burnt out child-man, with drinking, random shooting, loose loving of boys and girls, and convincingly played with cynical smiles and wanton destructiveness. The young poet, with empty pockets, is happy to hang about, but wary of trouble, and cautious by nature. Attracted to the loose and lovely sister, he decides nonetheless to lose his virginity with a safer and plainer girl, Elli. Strange comment at the end of the film regarding this minor player, Elli: that she never did get married. That the others did, we must assume so?
The white summer clothes in the lake house give a wonderful feeling of pleasure and freedom - until the cynicism and drunkenness permeates everything. One certainly ends the film with a feeling of futility about life itself, especially its spoiled young.
The German title is "Was Nutzt die Liebe in Gedanken" - What is the use of love in thoughts. This translation of the title certainly lessens the possibility that people will find the film at all. In English it's awkward and unclear. I wonder why they didn't keep the original title, or come up with something more idiomatic for the world's viewers.
In the volatile era between world wars, two young men share a romantic view of life and its possibilities. They differ greatly: Paul, a shy poet, come...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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