Als wir träumten

What I first heard about this movie is that it is based on a "cult book" about a group of youths in the years before and after the German unification (1989), which was apparently deemed "impossible to turn into a movie" due to its tumescent (500+ pages) and incoherent style of narration. Well, they can't accuse the script writer and the director of not being true to the original. The narration of the movie is equally choppy and ambling. There are a few story lines, such as when the gang of friends manages to start a successful techno club, but mostly we witness a bunch of highly unlikable louts who drink excessively, smoke excessively, take drugs, have no sex whatsoever, and mostly wreck everything in sight.

Sorry, let me rephrase that. We witness a bunch of ACTORS who desperately try to act reckless and unfettered. They shoplift, they joyride, they road-rage through Leipzig screaming and throwing bottles, and finally they wreck a whole street full of cars. When the obligatory skinheads (we're in post-unification East Germany, kids) arrive on the scene, I was almost rooting for them. Anything to stop those pinheads. I had zero sympathy for the protagonists.

So, after seemingly endless drunken strobe-lit techno orgies, they all end up in jail, or dead, or as prostitutes or junkies? That's bleak, or histrionic, perhaps, but it's simply not interesting.

If then the critics of German broadsheet FAZ call this film "world class cinema", I hope they're not talking about this planet.