FNC’08 Review: Cloud 9

Seventy is the new twenty in this German tragic-romance starring Ursula Werner as Inge. Married to her calm and educated husband Werner for thirty years, Inge is your average aging woman - stout with loose skin, knitting as a side business, and singing in an elderly woman’s choir. Suddenly swept by an influx of new unexplainable feelings, she begins an intimate affair with another man, Karl. Initially jarring due to the frequent and surprisingly graphic sex in the first part of the film, it is clear Cloud 9 (Wolke Neun) exhibits the basic themes of tragic-romances (namely lust & passion, betrayal & confusion); only this particular drama stars sixty to seventy-somethings. What this manages to emphasize is that these particular feelings never disappear, regardless of age.

Inge & Karl enjoy their sweet affair

Andreas Dresen reminds the viewers that its principal characters originate from a different time. Werner listens to crackled records of old train recordings, and has a penchant for voyaging on the railroad. Karl rides his bicycle around the autoroutes and skinny dips in murky lakes - but ever-present is the groan of airplanes overhead or the turn of the modern windmill in the distance. While the visual and aural cues date the protagonists, this only seems to exemplify that the actions and feelings are still modern, still universal. What detracts from Cloud 9 is how it manages to only tread upon the issues and closes with a sucker punch to the gut that frankly felt out of tune with the rest of the film. The slippery slope of adultery has traveled this path often before, and while everyone eventually comes down from “cloud nine” (I get it), it didn’t have to be be smack into the pavement.

In the end, Andreas Dresen and especially the cast of Cloud 9 need to be commended for being able to create a film that shows love and lust in some raw scenes. In a world where making love is hardly ever shown as anything but between two young plastic stars, it is refreshing to see intimacy in later stages of life - something many who are younger pretend does not exist or prefer not to think about. One particular scene has Inge and Werner visit their children and grandchildren in a family milieu, which is an image that most younger people feel is unshakeable. Cloud 9 will certainly shake this comfortable view. Along with Ulla Wagner’s The Invention of Curried Sausage that premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival, Germany is certainly showing that it can easily tackle a more aged kind of love and lust, and that’s a good thing.

Calm Werner scrutinized by Inge