Is sex too good to be wasted on the young?

Cloud 9 (Wolke Neun)

Andreas Dresen, 2009

Some of the sweetest love-scenes in cinema feature a man in his Seventies and a woman barely a decade younger. Their bodies are weathered, used, matured like old wine - and (in Malcolm X's oft-quoted words) they are beautiful.

But there is more to this touching and ultimately tragic tale than its soft-porn love scenes.

Though it ends (disappointingly) with a bow to conventional sexual mores, the scenario challenges a number of contemporary conventions. The married woman, Inge (played wonderfully by Ursula Werner), cheats on her husband (Horst Westphal) not because she has fallen out of love with him, but because she is consumed with lust for this other. True, the husband is a bit of a dry old stick, listening to his LPs of classic steam engines (the one we hear is actually a loco from the old GDR), but see observe similar tenderness in their love scenes. And as she tells her lover (Horst Rehberg), she enjoys the mystery excursions her husband plans, rail journeys to who knows where, so much more interesting than autobahn trips.

And then when she confesses her transgressions to her daughter, Petra (Steffi Kuhnert), instead of being disgusted at her mother's romps with another man, Petra kisses congratulates her - making her promise not to tell anyone else about it.

Needless to say, this is a promise she can't keep, and everything spirals out of control when she tells her husband about the affair.

And the film spirals down into a more conventional morality.

It might have been more interesting if, instead of getting angry, he also had embraced her and assured her that he would love her through thick and thin.

It gets worse: having set up an unconventional (but far from unique) situation, the director then settles for a rather unconvincing denouement, in which the husband (conveniently) dies, and Inge faces a guilt-ridden future.

Yawn!

Nevertheless, this is a remarkable piece of film-making, all the more remarkable since the dialogue was entirely improvised.

There's a moment, during shooting, when the lover was supposed to be sharing the secrets of his past life, which went through take after take, and just didn't work.

Andreas Dresen instructed Rehberg to tell a joke. He does so, and Ursula Werner (who hadn't known the joke) is convulsed with laughter, which seems just so real. Later, she re-tells the joke to her husband, who doesn't find it at all funny (he doesn't know, at that time, what she's been up to).

Actually, it's not very funny, but it it does provide one of the high points in the story.

The film will be released on DVD next year. It's available in Germany right now.