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Fraülein Fever

Cursing the landlord in 'Nobody Loves Me'

By Richard von Busack

Spot 1019 has a song about a mythological beast "with poisonous spines like an urchin/but all cuddly and cute like a kitten," which is a fair description of the moods in Nobody Loves Me, an amusing story of a death-obsessed German gal named Fanny Fink (Maria Schrader). Fanny, who lives in a decaying tower apartment building, is single, desperate and so ready for the Reaper that she has even been taking death-actualization classes. While she's studying, she meets her neighbor, an African-German fortuneteller named Orfeo (Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss). He predicts a lover for her, and she think she's found him in the person of the new manager of the place.

Unbeknownst to Fanny (but beknownst to us), the manager, Lothar (Michael Von Au), is a gentrifier, fiendishly ready to kick out the building's various eccentric tenants and turn it into condos. In an American movie, the crisis would be resolved by having Fanny turn Lothar's heart and marry him. Class struggle still lives in Germany, however, and Lothar gets a death-curse put on him by Orfeo. Feel-good moments like these make the movie highly recommendable.

Most of the film's appeal is due to Schrader, a charmer very much on the lines of Mary-Louise Parker, complete with tragic brown eyes and snub nose. Fanny's woeful desire for a man is poignant, but she doesn't seem helpless or neuter. Director Doris Dörrie (Men ...) blames the spirit of the times for Fanny's solitude--in one scene a television commentator pronounces somberly that he has "entirely empirical evidence that there's less sex now than in any point in history." Dörrie includes a very sweet sex scene during which Fanny talks about how it is for her in bed, how she can be easily distracted when making love but how her lovers should know she still wants to go through with it.

Moments like this outweigh a certain uneasiness in Orfeo's character. He isn't just a kindly neighbor--he does have his own story--yet occasionally Dörrie uses him as a stereotypical exotic, as in a sequence during which he and Fanny gets painted up and dance around an idol. So, despite its forays into deadly humor, Nobody Loves Me is a sometimes dippy film. There's nothing dippy, for instance, about vegetarianism, but there is something dippy about swooning over it. Fanny wants her tombstone to read that she never ate anything with eyes--well, what about a potato? Dörrie's heart is in the right place; you're just not sure about her brain.

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Nobody Loves Me (Unrated; 104 min.), directed and written by Doris Dörrie, photographed by Helge Weindler and starring Maria Schrader, Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss and Michael Von Au.


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