Silvester Countdown

This is an overlong student film, obviously conceived by a middle-class German male in his 20s, probably hailing from a small- to medium-sized provincial city. The film just reeks of that sensibility, which anyone who has been to Germany (or Mallorca, or Ibiza) in the past ten years will catch whiff of within the opening three minutes. Limp attempts to shock with sex, dialogue, and drugs, get old very fast in this one. The best thing in it is the female lead, who manages to maintain a commendable degree of freshness and believeability long after we've stopped caring about her counterpart, or anything else in this immature effort.

A young, wild and sex-addicted Berlin artist couple is spending the turn of the year in Warsaw with some friends, and during their drug parties and trips through the bars and streets of the Eastern European city, their relationship becomes difficult more and more, resulting in fights and struggles until they return to Berlin on New Year's Eve.

There's no real plot here in this cheaply made student film, and the focus is based on the extreme young characters, funnily named Romeo and Julia here. The beginning is really weird and inspiring, presenting the couple as a really unconventional, spontaneous and sex-crazed pair of outsiders living together in a big and empty Berlin flat. With the running of the film, the plot becomes a bit to boring and uninspired and the characters much too difficult and unrealistic to follow for the audience.

The soundtrack is pretty cool, and there are some nice sex scenes and a funny masturbation sequence of main actor Kahle in front of a bathroom mirror, but all in all this example of young German cinema of the nineties is too much doomed by the fate of the dreadful seventies'/eighties' art house psycho dramas and the equally bad German "Beziehungskomoedien" (relationship comedies) of the early nineties so that you're often about to change the TV program and choose one of your old "Die Hard" videos instead for the rest of the night.