Les nouveaux mecs

This is gem of a movie which does not lose any of its wit and charm with the passage of time. The fast pace and irreverence to social institutions kept us howling until our sides ached. Don't misunderstand me, however; the plot of one mans journey to his sexuality is pursued with fever right up to its hilarious climax! I would say that anyone of any sexual orientation with a sense of humor should watch this one with a friend or lover or both!

There is only one reason to watch this film: sexy Til Schweiger. He has beauty and magnetism, besides being an extraordinary young actor with subtlety, understated power, and depth. Unfortunately, these qualities are all but lost in this heavy-handed comedy. It is beautifully shot but, considering its comedic intent, rather darkly so. The story and its underlying principles leave much to be desired.

Handsome Axel (Schweiger) works in a 30's-style supper club, presumably to remind us of the wacky social farces of that period. Any illusions on that score end, however, when he gallantly accompanies an inviting woman into the bathroom for a quickie. His girlfriend Doro, in the next stall, informs him that they're through. Axel is a very pretty boy but, looking for a place to stay, he is rebuffed with varying degrees of vehemence by former girlfriends all too familiar with his womanizing. Alas, Axel's unfortunate coitus interruptus is the inauspicious high point of the movie, with the opening credits barely over.

Axel is adopted by a group of 'thoughtful' gay men in his hour of need. Norbert, a middle-aged nebbish, gives him a place to stay in hopes that there is a 'maybe'. What ensues is a series of awkward and tasteless gags, mostly involving Axel's discomfort being around gays. Stereotypes abound, and no one comes off particularly well. The straight men are dorky, unattractive, and strangely mortified by the use of common euphemisms for breasts. The gay men are selfish, unattractive, and impossibly flamboyant (in case we miss the point). Doro is shrill, intolerant, and controlling. Axel is shallow, thoughtless, and virtually monosyllabic, but adorable .

When Axel speaks of 'us normal men' we know where the film stands politically. The gay men appear in female attire much of the time, but speak in caricatured bass voices (in case we miss the point). Axel is deeply offended when cruised by a gay man in a gay disco; especially surprising as he asked the man for a light and directions to the bathroom, while hot, sweaty, and very sexy in a tight muscle shirt. 'Nuff said.

The plot thickens – and so does the humor – when Doro finds that she is pregnant and decides to get Axel back. She finds him in her own bed with unsightly Norbert, disturbingly naked, in the middle of a very inept seduction. Despite this awkward reunion, Axel and Doro get married. Axel unceremoniously drops Norbert because his wife is 'allergic to gays' .

The downward spiral continues unabated. Norbert, a strict vegetarian, hooks up with a repellent and humorless butcher, about whom the best one can say is that he has shaved every inch of his gross body. Axel cheats on Doro yet again, with a woman whose animal stimulants put him a coma. We finally hit rock bottom when Doro is bitch-slapped during one last bout of hysteria, and goes into labor. This is funny?

Til Schweiger is scrumptious eye-candy, and looks stunning throughout the film in tight t-shirts, muscle shirts, open shirts, no shirt. Thank heavens for small mercies. But, in one unfortunate aesthetic choice after another, the odious older men appear in greater states of undress more often than the exquisite young man who makes this peculiar move worth watching.

The ending has a nice feeling and suggests some reconciliation between Norbert and Axel. It's way too little, too late.

I saw this film in Germany when it came out as I was living there at the time. It was one of the funniest films I ever saw. Some years later I got a subtitled copy back in England and was shocked at how unfunny it was when translated. Which goes to show that humour often only works in the language it was created in.

That said, it is still a very unstylised view of culture clashes and a study of how far people are prepared to go when they aren't getting any sex. No one gets what they want by the end: the gay man doesn't get his straight friend; the straight man doesn't get his free-love lifestyle; the straight woman doesn't get her angry singledom.

I guess the moral is that you can take the human out of their sexuality, but you can't take the sexuality out of the human. Trite, but it reflects the title of the film, referring to a proverbial fish out of water.

`Maybe, Maybe Not' is one of the most odd movies I've ever seen. I liked it. I think I liked it because it is so completely different than all the American movies I'm used to seeing. In the beginning, the main character, Axel, decides to randomly have sex with some girl in the bathroom of his workplace. A woman in the next stall recognizes the key chain that dropped from one of the fornicating couple's clothes. She peeks over the stall to find her boyfriend of three years mindlessly humping another woman. She kicks him out of their apartment and throughout the rest of the movie he struggles with where to live. Initially he calls old girlfriends who all readily turn him away. Then he ends up at a `men's group' with a lot of gay guys. After that, he gets drunk at a party and goes home to sleep at one of their houses. This is when the gender preference battle begins. A lot of stereotypes were defied in this movie and I found that extremely refreshing. For example, it is commonly thought in American society that gay men are promiscuous, however in this movie, no homosexual sex is shown. There is one man-to-man kiss in the club and in another scene homosexual activity is inferred while watching slides but not directly shown on the screen. There are, however, two comparatively graphic heterosexual scenes. Another stereotype defied was the `effeminate gay men' stereotype. The main gay character, Norbert, didn't act effeminate at all, not even in drag. My favorite part of the movie however perpetuated and made fun of an existing stereotype - the stupid Stallone-loving straight guy. The guys in the movie theater were very intriguing. I thought they added welcome comic relief to an otherwise tense and dark movie.

This is yet another of those cases where Anglosaxon audiences might be tempted to think that it reenforces their prejudice that German humour is a no-show.

The problem can be described in one word: subtitles. I (a native German speaker) watched the UK release which is the original German version with English subtitles. The dialogue of this film is very funny and sharp; it is quite different from contemporary funny English dialogue which usually goes for funny one-liners, it has more in common with the humour you find in Oscar Wilde, for example in The Importance of Being Earnest. In other words, the characters are constantly trying to (literally) outwit each other whilst keeping the conversation afloat. This kind of dialogue is quite fashionable in certain parts of German culture, but at least in Britain it has become fairly rare. Consequently, the translators had a difficult job on their hands.

Occasionally my eyes wandered towards the subtitles to see what the translators did with the latest banter - and I was appalled with what I found. Yes, the translation was factually accurate, i.e. the content of what was said was accurately translated, but all the wit, the sharpness, the humour had gone. As already mentioned, this was a difficult translation job, but the translators did not try hard enough.