It all revolves around a slightly sleazy Munich night club called Moulin Rouge. Several stories are told intertwining, but they all are connected to the protagonists of the before mentioned night club and all the story lines show different aspects (drug pushing/drug addiction, family dramas, double lives, true love and fake love between customers and sex workers, lesbian relationships, promiscuity, sexual violence, gangsters, murder).
It starts with the under age (meaning under 21) daughter of West German industrial from Dusseldorf who gets dumped by her lover and is looking for places to stay because she's out of money (she ran away from home) and it ends with a couple finding love by chance (under tragic circumstances). There's really a lot happening. Sometimes it's lighthearted and funny, sometimes it's serious and very dramatic.
It kind of has a heart for all the characters involved (even the bad ones) and you get a picture, more a glimpse, of the night club life during this now long gone time.
I was totally surprised by this kind of Robert Altman approach of storytelling. Apart from that the look and feel of that era in West Germany, the sense of place and time, are a definitive plus. There are many good and familiar German actresses and actors of the time involved and the actresses are beautiful (thematically there's nudity involved). Also the songs on the soundtrack add to that nostalgia.
With a running time of under 90 minutes it's pretty fast paced and never drags or gets boring. Just the ending feels a little bit rushed, too abrupt for my taste. All in all a welcome surprise and a definitive recommendation for anyone who is interested in West German post war exploitation of the 1960s and 1970s.
