It’s 6451’s last day at the Berlinale. This evening, we decided to only watch one film, such that we can finish the day early-ish and spend the rest of the time eating foods and reliving the Berlinale up until now. Can you believe that 6451 saw 13 movies in just 4 days? That is amazing efficacy. As expected, it was a nice evening with take-out food and good conversation at Pixelmatsch’s cozy place. Needless to say, I immensely enjoyed 6451’s ranking of Berlinale films. Incidentally, “Neun Leben hat die Katze” was pretty much the worst film up until now, which is kind of unfortunate because all three of us got tickets for it beforehand.
Neun Leben hat die Katze
Germany 1968, Ula Stöckl, 92′
The screenshot is quite indicative of what is going on in this story: It’s some sort of crazy 60s artsy collection of vignettes of the love lives of a few young women living in Munich. There are the two protagonists who are being courted by the same guy, one of them is French and talks about love a lot, the other one is in love with some good-looking dude who has a wife and cute children. The wife wants to kill him (I think?) when she hears about his infidelities. Then, a few other female characters also come into play and slowly, the film descends into surreal madness, from which the screenshot. At the point where aforementioned dude is surrounded by bare-breasted girls in dirndls, I completely lost hope in the film. This is unfortunate, because I enjoyed the first 40 minutes or so of the film immensely. Some of the dialogue was absolutely spot-on, pretty much everything involving the ugly dude who does the weirdest things in the attempts of seducing a girl. He tries to convince protagonist 1 that if she is nice to him then she must promise him to do it only with him, and when protagonist 2 tells him about her life problems, he proposes that a relationship with him would be the solution to all of her problems. The movie has interesting characters and looks effortlessly stylish – if only it had actually bothered to construct a proper story instead of doing this unnecessary artsy stuff. Much like “Jahrgang 45”, I thought the movie was a pale imitation of the Nouvelle Vague. For a feminist film (which I think it tries to be), I think it absolutely fails the Bechdel test: Much like in “The Women”, there are tons of women on screen, but they only talk about men. The movie is only recommendable for its small amount of Munichporn.