Les nouveaux mecs

This film is about a man's life turning upside down after spending the night in a gay man's house.

This film is so funny! The acting is great, the two lead characters, Axel and Norbert are outstanding. Axel is a man who cannot say no to temptation. Norbert, is a secret admirer of Axel. He is cute and hilarious. Axel's wife, Doro, accidentally discovers her husband befriending Norbert. One coincidence after another, she becomes convinced of her husband's homosexuality.

The plot is also very good. Though I can only catch German isolated phrases here and there, I still find the film entertaining. I laughed out loud many times. The sets are also decorated nicely, each of the apartments are set up so that they really feel like a home sweet home. Apart from being entertaining, it also promotes tolerance and diversity.

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.

I thought it was fine. Not exactly deep stuff, but entertaining. Everything must be taken in context, if possible, and this was based on a popular comic strip by Ralf Koenig -- I'm guessing he's gay, based on other stuff I've seen of his, so whether his work perpetuates stereotypes or is the honest humor of a member of the gay community is not so easy to say. Not for me, anyway. I found Germany in the mid-1990s to be more tolerant of homosexuals than my hometown in Amerika, but a lot has changed in the intervening years. Anyway, political incorrectness aside, I think of this as a light comedy about relationships, like another Soenke Wortmann films I've seen [Stadtgespraech]. For students of the German language, it was a wonderful opportunity to catch some slang and modern, conversational German that we don't see in deep, intellectual films based on historical or literary sources.

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!

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.