11 - The Romantic Comedy and Its Other: Representations of Romance in German Cinema since 1990

Summary

Til schweiger's 2007 hit romantic comedy Keinohrhasen (Rabbit Without Ears) opens with a spoof on Hollywood stardom. In its first scene, German art-cinema actor Jürgen Vogel, playing himself, pretends to have undergone a ridiculous transformation, or rather, Americanization. Bragging about his supposedly improved appearance, which includes exaggerated dental work, a deep tan, substantial hair replacements, and silicone butt implants, Vogel announces that his previous work doing “arthouse shit” like Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (Life is a Construction Site, released in English as Life is All You Get, 1997) appealed only to an audience of “pseudo-intellectual pop culture idiots from Berlin,” but left him dissatisfied and depressed. While these statements are later revealed as a parody staged to make fun of gullible paparazzi journalists, this opening also reflexively contrasts films such as the humorous Keinohrhasen with arguably more “alternative” arthouse productions, which are favored by critics but frustrate general audiences. Schweiger's petulant response to not being considered for the German Film Prize in 2008 (he left the German Film Academy and announced that he would establish his own award), despite the film's overwhelming popularity (by 2008 6.3 million Germans had seen the film, which put it ahead at the box office, surpassing all other cinematic releases, including big Hollywood blockbusters, that year), while Fatih Akin's much less successful Auf der anderen Seite (On the Other Side, released in English as The Edge of Heaven, 2007), which barely drew 500,000 viewers, went home with the coveted Lola award, recalls familiar tensions between high and low art biases towards the cinema.