HerbertSchwaab

This is the best comedy about puberty and adolescence and I wonder why it has not been regarded as a cult movie yet. Based on his own comic director Gerard Lauzier presents us a 16 year old brat who couldn´t be more arrogant towards his loving mother and father. Helpless and constantly hurt by his intolerable hatred, they rent him a room upstairs where he drives himself more and more into a teenage depression, which he finally wants to cure in the hippie family of his school mate. This is a detailed portrait of teenage psychology in a stadium of life, where one claims his superiority to his parents and anybody else, but where one doesn´t really know that one´s anger is derived from sexual frustration and irritation. All these little details about adolescence make this film incredibly funny. I always recommend it to friends and they are very grateful. But the film doesn´t seem to be very much known (outside France), maybe because there isn´t any other film of note from the director.

Hark Bohm is one of the few directors, who really finds interest in the world of teenagers. The central character is very complex and somehow idiosyncratic. It is difficult to understand all of his acts of rebellion, in the same way it is difficult to understand teenagers at all. It is a movie about 15 year old son of a Bohemian family from Hamburg, Germany. He is an outsider, but in the end he makes friends as a saxophone player in a teenage rock combo. This not very well known and underrated film is a must see for those, who are interested in this genre.

I have seen this movie as a child. Maybe I am misguided by my memories, but I was quite impressed then of the adventures of two men who try to get back the money, they have lost in the streets of Paris. It is sort of a epical comedy, an odyssey through Paris. It adopts the rhythm of a road movie, which might appear to some as an unstructured failure, but which has a certain poetic atmosphere. It is one of the few Heinz Rühmann movies (the most important german comedian of the last century) which I really like and his teaming with famous french comedian Fernandel is really for the benefit of both. Not to forget Jean Poiret, one of those underrated actors whose company one enjoys almost without noticing the actors presence. There are many moments and scenes which are engraved in my memories. But maybe I shouldn´t try to see it again.

If you belong to those who dislike the triviality and banality of German film after World War II (like myself) then you should turn to those films who were made in a short period between 1946 and 1949. Many of them show the will not to just simply go on like nothing happened but to search for new forms of entertainment in the light of the war and the guilt of the german people. "Film ohne Titel" (Film Without a Title) is an interesting reflection about the rights to be entertained: Which stories can be told, when all stories seem to have been finished? It shows the attempts of a film crew to shoot a film. They offer several versions of one simple love story in different film form (melodrama or german expressionism) until they come out with the right form (which is this film itself). The film is entertaining and modern as well. Unfortunately questions of film form were not to be touched again until the seventies.