Herr Lehmann (Leander Haußmann, 2003)

Frank Lehmann is a loafer living in a bubble about to burst: about to turn thirty, as the Berlin enclave of Kreuzberg that he and his friends never venture beyond is about to be breached by the falling of The Wall.
Haußmann's film is faithful to Sven Regener's best-selling, autobiographically derived comic novel about Berlin boho life in the '80s, and for the most part makes a virtue of having its characters do very little at all apart from drinking and talking crap. They circulate around the same three bars day in, day out, and their conversation has the same circular motion, with their individual mantras repeated ad absurdum until transmuted into comedy. The formula does have diminishing returns, however, and the director's obvious need to escape this comfortable milieu and say something with a wider resonance doesn't quite find an outlet, running into several narrative dead ends. But there are still enough little pleasures along the way to make it more a stumble and skip than a trudge towards the looming end-of-an-era coda.

6/10