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  • Warning: Spoilers
    "Baby frei Haus" is a German television movie from 2009, so this one has its 10th anniversary this year and it runs for 90 minutes like the vast majority of German small screen releases. The director was Franziska Meyer Price, very prolific when it comes to television filmmaking, also back then, while the script is by the late Michael Baier, equally prolific and this was definitely one of his later career efforts, actually his last work on a movie, not TV series. This one aired on television today and the main reason for that is probably because it has Fritz Wepper playing a main character (never know who is Fritz and who is Elmar..) and his co-lead is played by Francis Fulton-Smith, who is also not unknown here in Germany, but usually stars on schmaltzy stuff rather than comedy like this one here. This is the story of two men who constantly argue because they struggle with each other being their neighbor and the noise they produce. Not gonna go a lot into detail what kind of noise, but lets just say they are not exactly friends early on and things get even worse when one (the photographer) has a shooting at the swimming pool where the other is working. This is already where the problems start. Honestly, something like this would have been announced and prepared nicely iin reality and not the way it was depicted here. So yeah realism is a very frequent problem this movie has. Or I should say lack thereof. I will give you a few other examples. Key of the film is that the men are getting along better as they end up caring for a little baby girl somebody put in front of their door. This alone is already pretty unrealistic. I'd have expected the woman to ring the bell and ask if he could take the child and then realize that the father moved out already. But this is not one of the worst moment. It's not likely, but it could happen like this. However, the explanation that after 3 days or so in a psych ward she gets out already again despite her depressions and is alright, is quite an insult iin the face of everybody who really struggles with this illness. Or that within this very short period of time, the baby actually became part of a big campaign and is depicted on posters outside for advertising purposes. This is not reality. Lets not say anything else about how one of these big posters is right there when the mother enters the street again. Or how at the end, she just runs away with the child instead of talking to the guys calmly over a cup of coffee. And right when you accepted this and that she is gone, she suddenly rings their bell and now she wants to talk. Or at the very end, how Wepper's character wants to leave the country from one day to the next permanently. Honestly, it was difficult to appreciate the comedy in the face of all this shoddy writing we got here. Which is a pity because Wepper and FFS had solid chemistry and Stumph with her little screen time is not too bad either. So given the cast, this could have been a better film for sure. The talent is there. But the writing is not convincing by any means I must say. The moments that made me forget about that like the references about them now being a gay couple are just too scarcy. So all in all, not really worth seeing, but the actors kept it from being a failure most of the time. Still I suggest you skip this one.