Barbara Beutler

FREAK ORLANDO is divided into five more-or-less distinct sections, all featuring "Freak" Orlando, a woman, played by the late Magdalena Montezuma, who appears in various guises, and deformities, throughout.

A somewhat impressionist, at times even slightly surreal miniature about a student (Werner Stocker in a splendid performance) who, out of financial difficulties, starts out as pool attendant at an open air swimming pool in Berlin's district of Neukölln. Escaping from his unpleasant landlord and his lover Patrizia (a very young Martina Gedeck), he soon starts to live at the baths, and as swimmers disappear and the baths are closed for the winter, he turns the grounds into his own, perfect refuge from civilisation and social pressure, becoming increasingly detached from reality. What may sound like an annoyingly gimmicky premise is executed here playfully, yet with admirable simplicity and a subtle, unpretentious poetic sensibility that one would wish for more often in contemporary German cinema.

The first film in Rudolf Thome's "Forms of Love" trilogy is the most incisive. It's a comedy-drame chronicling the ups and downs in the relationship of an unmarried couple (Adriana Altaras, Vladimir Weigl). When she tries to persuade him that they should have a child, he escapes the controversy by becoming preoccupied with his new aquarium and microscope. Their struggles to settle their differences and accept new responsibilities are presented intelligently, realistically and with low-key wit and irony.