Die Venusfalle

A doctor is torn between three fabulously beautiful women in 1980ies Berlin with one oneiric sequence chasing the other -- and that's about it. It's the type of movie that can make an impression on you if you're watching it on the silver screen, but seen on the small screen of your boob tube it's simply not enough to capture and hold your imagination. Director Robert von Ackeren is a great stylist and has, in many ways, made one of the quintessential 1980ies movies: cold, glossy surfaces and sulphurous emotions in a city that looks more like metropolis than modern Berlin, and not much in the way of story, plot or narration.

At the time of its release this movie was considered notorious, and Sonja Kirchberger was the talk of the town -- or rather, publicity photos of her flashing her boobs in that négligé were sprawled over magazine covers. Rather childishly, most professional critics seem to have taken umbrage against the fact that Kirchberger wasn't a professional actress but -- so the legend went -- a mere dental technician who was "scouted" by the director in some furniture catalog. Oh my god, an actress who's had a real job -- let's heat up the pyre! Another criticism seems to have been that the movie's visual style wasn't gritty and realistic enough -- which is also way off point, like criticizing a Vietnam war movie for not containing enough scenes with werewolves.

Overall, the movie really lacks some sort of plot, it's mostly a bold, superficial vision of a neon-lit world where all women are gorgeous and prey on men. It would be interesting to see what von Ackeren can do with a good script.

One star for effort to mislead me. So, supposedly events taking place in Berlin? And divided Berlin never existed? I guess its easy to ignore anything as long as you can get away with it. So, supposedly this flick is about sex and love but they lost along the lines as movie don't have coherent plot or music or real life. The producer couldn't comprehend the idea a movie is illusion and added second illusion for another hour. Whatever, I'm in no mood to start discussion.

From time to time, people imagine other (beautiful) people fornicating like rabbits. Then societal norms usually require to embed these actions in a "proper" context.

In a well-known example of this, the German phrase "Aber warum liegt hier überhaupt Stroh 'rum?" is enough for that. But this lacks the "artistic" or "intellectual" checkmarks that need to be ticked for a film to be financed with 1,45 million Deutschmarks (at 1988 value) by the tax payer or favourably reviewed in "serious" newspapers.

So the script of this film adds a bunch of lines that feel like passwords in a spy movie: One character says something nonsensical, and then the other character immediately feels enough motivation to start copulating. This makes it feel like a writer's dream turned into moving pictures - where a doctor's attractivity does not stem from their socioeconomic status, but from a single sentence, easily imitable without having to study or work very hard.