FREE ON YOUTUBE Das Leben ist eine Baustelle

On the first of May 2020, the very, very, very-first-First of all May, in which all of Berlin is hooded (by order of the Senate!!!). And who knows, maybe there will be something this year, too, because for more than a month police controls have been crossing the city, monitoring the quarantine of Berliners during the Corona epidemic. Do you think the Berlin autonomists approve of this? When Wolfgang Becker staged Life Is All You Get, Berliners were used to the fact that May Day means war. Burning streets. Every year the Senator for the Interior had to answer for not having had the first of May under control again. It's about the same as we are used to today, that the Berlin airport will never be finished. But back to Life Is All You Get. Which film really shows the Kohl era after the fall of the Berlin Wall? I think it's this one! Wolfgang Becker's film has the unofficial subtitle "Love in the times of the Kohl era" and that's in the early 90s! Life Is All You Get is the first anti-German comedy, not from Munich, but from chic Berlin. He, Jan, a Kreuzberg casual worker, she, Vera, an artist, probably from the new east of the city, but also penniless. The love of both offers us a journey deep into the lower class, into rented flats where sex parties take place and the children are strangely brought up (vegetable eaters are the unemployed of tomorrow!). But Wolfgang Becker's drama also offers some almost surreal sequences and an endless wealth of beautiful ideas. A journey back to the Berlin of the 90s! Jürgen Vogel plays Jan Nebel, who works as a temp in a slaughterhouse. On the first of May in Kreuzberg he meets a hooded man who is being chased by plainclothes police. Jan intervenes, pulls a policeman to the ground, believing that he is attacking a woman. She shouts to him that he has just knocked down a cop and they are both fleeing. Into a Kreuzberg apartment, where a family man and his children are training to assign the death cries from various horror films. He is wearing white ribbed underpants, his wife looks as if she has been smoking chain for 100 years. Jan is caught and convicted, but now he knows Vera, the hooded woman. But their first date is anything but romantic... By the way, Kreuzberg is still Kreuzberg here, a prolo district without cafés, only with bars. Vera is played by Christiane Paul. She floats through life and helps herself to congress buffets uninvited. Jan, on the other hand, fights his way through and yet is always thrown back. He does not understand Vera. She is not tangible for him and is actually not accessible. Wolfgang Becker wrote the film together with Tom Tykwer. The common idea: Here the man should not be an architect for once and the woman a journalist. We don't see fancy Munich lofts, either, but Berlin bays. When Life Is All You Get came to the cinema, all this was still quite unusual. We had a lot behind us, like the bad German relationship comedy of the 90s, and Becker and Tykwer wanted to fight against that. Life Is All You Get features great supporting characters like Jan's sister Lilo (Martina Gedeck), who organizes nude shopping parties at home instead of taking care of her daughter. In the next room her husband Harry (Armin Rohde) lurks in bed, who grumbles during the whole movie. I remember Ricky Tomlinson as Buddy the longest. A not quite young man who lives in his memories. Jan makes friends with him and maybe there is even something like hope in this tender film...

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