Suis-je belle ?

I've just seen "Bin ich schön?" today and I totally disagree with the other critic. I think this film is BEAUTIFUL (That's the better word to describe it) because it's made of small things and tries not to give a lesson or just entertain you for two hours, you will leave the cinema with your heart touched... No one had showed me Spain, the way Doris Dörrie did... Plain, simple and yet astonishing... Perhaps I understood her because I come from a country that lives of small rituals like Spain does. The music is also fantastic, like in every Dörrie film.

A movie like the life - complex, with unexpected connections, ups and downs - intelligently made. The actors are great as well, especially Franka Potente.

"Life according to Doris" might be an adequate alternative title to this film. Instead of telling a linear story with a showdown, Dörrie spotlights moments in people's life that tell everything about their past, their present and the world that surrounds them. The way she does it puts her in one line with Jim Jarmusch. As in most of her other films, it is what the characters say and do more than how it is filmed what makes the film. "Bin ich schön?" is the closest any of Dörries's films comes to her remarkable short stories.

Now that is a film that tries to show the modern world of relationships and how many people just do not get what they want, due to mean folks around, lack of communication and trust or just unfitting circumstances. Depressing autumn movie, but with a glimpse of hope and great music of mostly Spanish origin.

This movie knits a web of stories that revolve around the loveless wedding of a girl, concerning her mother and father, her sisters, her former boyfriend, the wedding party caterer, a girl accidentally met in a rainy evening, and the people these people meet: a Spanish man who brings the ashes of his dead German wife to Germany, to bring her to the rain and green grass she missed; an extravagant girl who seeks the attention of strangers by pretending she is handicapped or ill; the father's mistress who slashes her wrists in a clandestine visit to her lover's house; an abandoned old woman found by the younger sister in the airport.

The stories, located half in Germany and half in Spain, can be intensely poetic, or intensely brutal, or funny, or poignant, and make up an absorbing whole. All of them have to do with love, love being found, lost or hankered after. By the end of the movie the stories have not been brought to any closure; like in life, there are no neat endings.