Berlin Love Story
A comedy
Characters
JAN
32 years old, a painter, thin, not tall, not handsome. His whole figure has something bird-like about it. He seems like a good-natured child who has somehow slipped into our time and has to reorient himself in it every day.
ANNA
28 years old – a very beautiful woman, a pragmatic loner, distrustful and rather indifferent to herself. Her fear of intimacy and her distrust of the world initially create an atmosphere of weary loneliness and self-abandonment around her.
NINA
Thirty years old, a child without a father, with a child without a father. She is full of longing and tenderness, but these feelings find no expression. Alcohol is her solace, increasingly alienating her from reality.
SIEGMAR LAUTERHALS
51 years old, physically tall, but inwardly a stunted dwarf. He possesses that kind of political allure that promises everything and delivers nothing, the kind you slip off like a bar of soap.
MIKE GRABOWSKI – called – the sphere
54 years old, short, fat, polished brutality that enters with a smile and, for a few euros more, makes hell dance.
MARTIN HIMMELMANN
58 years old, gray, cautious, sad. He seems as if he was frozen at some point and hasn't thawed out yet. A wolf in office, a lamb at home.
ACTION
Berlin Love Story – A bizarre fight for survival above the rooftops of the capital
Jan is 32, chronically broke, and a painter whose art no one wants to buy. His roommate Anna is 28, beautiful, disillusioned, and secretly earns money as a dominatrix to pay for her grandmother's dementia and the rent. And then there's their depressed neighbor Nina, who regularly climbs over the balcony wall drunk because she doesn't know what else to do—dragging her screaming baby Basti, whose father is stuck in Ukraine.
As eviction looms and financial chaos ensues, the arch-conservative leading politician Siegmar Lauterhals suddenly appears on television. During his election campaign, he preaches the "holy family" and traditional values. What the voters don't know: Lauterhals is one of Anna's most loyal sadomasochistic clients and, in private, crawls across the floor whimpering in a corset.
Jan, the normally good-natured dreamer, transforms into a criminal mastermind in the face of financial hardship. He hatches an absurd, highly risky blackmail plan: Nina is to pass off her baby as the politician's illegitimate child. With forged evidence, Anna's dominatrix paraphernalia, and a healthy dose of Berlin bluntness, the three underdogs demand €400,000 in hush money from the political star.
What begins as a desperate bluff quickly develops into a full-blown, turbulent farce full of lies, moral dilemmas, and unexpected twists. Will these three likeable losers manage to beat the corrupt system at its own game?
Or will the improvised baby plot be exposed at the last moment?
REVIEWS
Fred Apke's "Berlin Love Story" is a razor-sharp, bittersweet tragicomedy about the precariat generation, the double standards of the elite, and the question of how much crookship is allowed when you're really just looking for a little bit of happiness – and a ticket to the sea.