"In der Höhle der Löwin" (terrible title, so random, zero connection to the story other than this being about a confident female and a bad play on words too as the saying goes "Löwen") is a German television film from 2003, so this one is already over 15 years old now and it runs for 1.5 hours, slightly under, as they usually do. The director is Helmut Metzger and, well seeing how his career consists to a considerable extent of Katie Fforde adaptations (i.e. unrealistic schmaltz), you can already guess that we don't have a work of great quality, especially taking into account that other works he did include "Um Himmels Willen" and "Rosamunde Pilcher". The writer is Elisabeth Schwärzer, who has worked in smaller positions on some classic German films starring comedy greats like Otto, Loriot and Hallervorden, but when she was in charge of the script, then the outcome was frequently not convincing either. So I am not surprised that her last writing job is from more than a decade too. You can certainly say that talent is not exactly frequent for this project, no matter which perspective you take. The cast is okay though, many prolific small screen actors in here like Nitsch, Fendel, Zierl and Fitz, but neother of them are particularly talented and they all have mostly weak projects in their bodies of work. One thing you can say here is that this movie was definitely not a lucky charm for the females. Fendel and Peters are not alive anymore, but at least reached an old age, while Jennifer Nitsch really faced a tragic fate as she was suffering from depressions and commited suicide only one year after this movie. At the point of her death, she was still cast for lead roles, just like with this one here. One shall not speak negatively about the dead, but I cannot really see why because she also was not a particularly good actress. I guess her looks helped. Then again, I have seen her give worse performances than she did here.
In general, this film may never feel like a creative outcome and the entire relationship struggle story at the center of it all is not executed convincingly, but it is bearable, even if how the protagonist interacts with the men in her life was nothing inspiring or even likable. And the element of character development when it comes to Nitsch's character is just perfect evidence of how the writer is simply not talented to come up with a good plot to that regard. However, the moment the film hits rock-bottom is when the last 15 minutes begin. For some reason, they felt like they had to go all in by including the stereotypical big drama sequence with the argument between the main character and her mother and that results in the most ridiculous plot twist about the central character all of a sudden finding out that who she thought was her dad was actually gay and she has another dad. So in the most rushed manner, she goes to find the man and initially talks to somebody who looks like a bum and of course he is not the father, but it is the one who is still handsome despite being at an old age already (this actor is also still alive at an ancient age now, the male actors in this film got luckier) because after all Nitsch's character is also so attractive, or at least that is what they want us to believe. And as if that wasn't enough already, we also see her character's mom and dad being reunited in the typical happy ending that really sacrifices all realism for the sake of the easily influenced and simple-minded being happy and buying this schmaltz. Everybody with a decent taste in films won't though. I actually thought I could even give this film two stars out of five because admittedly it wasn't all bad until the last thirty minutes, but the way it hit rock-bottom there, I just can't. There are also many individual moments when the dialogues are written poorly and while it was not nice to watch these moments because the actors could not save it, it must be said in their favor that nobody really could have turned these moments into quality. One final mention to Helmut Zierl, who was probably the best from the cast and with a better script, he could have been slightly memorable. He surprised me positively. Overall, however, this is a film that is shown at noon on smaller television channels here for a reason and even for that it is maybe still too bad. Definitely skip.
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