For those who feel that cinema's highest purpose is to provide a genuine reflection of the sacred complexities of our everyday existence, there is more to admire in the first five minutes of Andreas Dresen's Cloud 9 than in an entire season's worth of Hollywood blockbusters. Dresen has spent the last decade making sincere, compelling films and collecting a closet full of festival awards, although he has yet to significantly break through in the United States, and Cloud 9 will almost certainly not propel him to international stardom. It seems rather unlikely that American audiences will flock to see a tender, thoughtful, and thought-provoking film about geriatric passion, though they certainly should. Ursula Werner carries the film magnificently as Inge, a 67-year-old married woman who is surprised to find the ardor of her youth being rekindled through an affair with an older man. Inge's 30-year marriage to Werner (Horst Rehberg) has settled into a routine of benign stagnation, and though the couple still engages in the occasional amorous embrace, there is nothing to match the delightful fervor Inge feels for Karl (Horst Westphal), one of the customers for whom she mends clothes. Near the beginning of the film, Inge delivers an altered pair of pants to Karl, and their flirtatious glances and gestures become inexorably more overt, allowing Dresen to present an anomaly in cinematic history -- a romantic scene in which the primary action consists of a man putting his pants on, rather than the opposite. The actors are nothing less than masterful in this scene, as their delicate play of nervous smiles and eye contact evolves until they are on the floor of the apartment, dutifully stripping for a bout of awkward, abbreviated, and much-appreciated sex.
As the affair goes on, and her feelings for Karl increase, Inge feels obliged to reveal her deceit to Werner, even as her daughter implores her to simply maintain her guise as a caring wife. As Inge tries to contain the divergent forces of personal passion and domestic duty which are tearing her in two, she continually justifies her behavior by saying that it is unintentional, that her love for Karl is a tsunami which has swept her away in its whirls and currents. This is a complicated claim that cuts to the heart of almost anything that matters in life -- if love preceded us then we are not its masters, but its subjects. The ending may seem to some inevitable, but it's somewhat disappointing that a film which has given us a love story that is almost singularly unique in screen history would eventually settle into the long literary and cinematic tradition of punishing women for their marital indiscretions. Nevertheless, in Cloud 9, Andreas Dresen has given us a profound and welcome testament to the endurance of the romantic spirit, which was likely here before us, and seems destined to outlive us all.