From Die tageszeitung, over at signandsight. “Andreas Dresen talks to Birgit Glombizta about geriatric love and sex, and his new film ‘Wolke 9′”:
Cloud 9″ takes 30 to 40-year-olds into their parents’ bedrooms and confronts them with scenes that sons and daughters would never want to think about in too much detail. Is this supposed to be enlightening in some way?
Yes, but that’s not my main concern. After all it’s a film about love, not sex. But the main character has no idea about this at the beginning. She is just wandering the streets in a daze when suddenly she finds herself on the rug of a man she barely knows. Then she tries to run away from these newly awakened feelings. At some point she gives in, realises she has to live this new love somehow. Even when none of this should be happening, after 30 years of marriage. If you think of the cinema as a strange dark box from which to examine the world and the human soul, then this subject should be in there too.
Allotments by the railway, choir practice, German folk-pop. Your earlier film “Halbe Treppe” was set in similar surroundings. Why are you so set on staying with the “common people”.
Most old people live like this and not upper middle class lives. We wanted to talk about normal people. Inge, Werner and Karl are not badly off, their lives are not beset by social crisis, and they are more or less contented. The fridge is full, the coffee percolator is gurgling away. Things could just go on as they are. And then catastrophe strikes, bang smack in the centre of this middle class, petty bourgeois world.