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Sadly Over-hyped

Highly Overrated But Still Good

As Good As It Gets

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Who needs subtitles. Just watch it in raw German. Best exemplifies Berlin as a place for elitist bi sexuals and Weimar bohemian types that circulated in the 1920's - 1930's. We are spared spartan Liebensraum volker angry butch women with their Teutonic hairy underarms, since the director skilfully selected only what men like to see: beautiful feminine women getting it on with each other. Of of course, there is a human element to all this, with the Fascist's looming in the background and all that. Too bad the story line could not wane a few more years of script, say, until the Russians invaded the city. Or, perhaps, they could have escaped to Nagasaki in a German U boat with the Japanese Ambassador. (Material for a sequel?) I got such a kick out of this film I would rate it five stars (like Eisenhower's rank) and keep it in my personal collection along with Peter Lorre's "M" and Montgomery Clift's, "The Big Lift".

I purchased this DVD because of its German star, the beautiful and soft-spoken Gudrun Landgrebe, who portrayed a tender and warm-hearted young woman so convincingly in the German TV series "Heimat". In the German version of this movie, she dubs her own part with near perfection and makes all the right faces all the time, but is condemned to play the silliest society woman one may ever encounter on the proverbial celluloid: falling "lesbianly" (so to speak) for a sour-faced, lying and manipulative Japanese woman, even though she is happily married to a successful diplomat in the German government. After the viewer becomes convinced to have seen the peak of cinematic stupidity, he is in for yet further astonishment when said happily married diplomat too falls for the Japanese and, in this state, becomes even jealous of his wife. Now, this male reviewer may not be able to judge correctly the authenticity of a lesbian infatuation, but he can assert that, as a man's sex object, the Japanese is so low on the totem pole to be below ground. Those fake sexual encounters, during which the participants never shed any of their clothing, do not exactly contribute to the credibility of the story either. Only Gudrun's 1930's Mercedes looks genuine.

This may not be as good as "The Night Porter", but it's a great film, and a pure Cavani: twisted plot, psychological dramas, attractions with no limits, and the characters trying to balance their lives between the beautiful and the ugly, the duties and the crimes... Once again the plot is complex and interesting; every twist of it kept me guessing - 'till the very end.The actors are not as famous as in some of her other films, but play their roles quite well and are naturally belivable.A film noir that may not be for everyone, but is a must for anyone who liked other works by Cavani.

It's simply one of the best darkest movie I've ever seen in my life. Very well told story. And the performance of Mio Takaki (Mitsuko Matsugae) is just exceptional. Perhaps is what Liliana Calvani use to do when she makes any film: to put her particular seal in each of them. And she put a huge one in "The Berlin Affair". Excellent!