Eye for Film / Movies

Sometimes a film doesn't need clever plot twists, lives connected by chance meetings, a barely concealed religious subtext or pretentious delusions of grandeur. Sometimes all you need are great characters, good jokes, and plenty of bodily fluids...

Black sheep tells five concurrent tales linked only by their setting, 21^st century Berlin.

The first concerns Boris, a hand model turned conman desperate to go straight and live a life of erotic experimentation with Nadja, the beautiful lady from Vogue. The only problem is that he's skint, but that's nothing that can't be fixed by insurance fraud after a wee bit of axe based finger pruning. The second story tells of Charlotte the tour barge announcer and her alcoholic boyfriend Peter who - through verbal and bile based abuse - consistantly sabotages her attempts to impress a former classmate and her posh husband. In another zone we join Ali and his mates; they're horny as hell and desparate for anything warm, wet and concave. Unfortunately after a series of brutal mishaps they end up beaten, in debt and floating in a lake, hopped up on rhino tranquilizers... Julian and Belin have a relatively mundane story of cannabis, anarchic hippy communes, gay artists and accidental anal leakage... Last, but by no means least, we meet Fred the Satanist and his pointy haired sidekick Arnold. It's hard work being evil...

... it's more like American Pie (without the prudish American restrictions) in the visual style of À Bout de Souffle. The result is a beautiful mess, a glorious shambles of bad taste and street humour, an exploration of youth culture in a city that eats, breathes and shits stories. Criticism could be levelled at the crude humour, juvenile tone... but really to do so would miss the point - this film is about anarchic entertainment not life changing cinema... great fun and a cult hit waiting to happen.

Review by George Williamson

How refreshing, after so much worthy endeavour, to find a film that wants to improve us not at all. That cares not a bit for educating us, or transforming us, or illuminating some hitherto unacknowledged facet of our contemporary lives. That, on the contrary, seeks only to entertain – and then, by the very crudest and most direct of means. A gleeful cavalcade of bad taste, Oliver Rihs’s feature is a provocation only to those prepared to be offended by it; for the rest of us, it’s a funny, rough-hewn and mostly effective comedy, extreme enough to nudge the boundaries of good taste while at the same time tinged with a real affection for the gallery of misfits, hustlers and dreamers it depicts.

Though its makers are mostly Swiss (writer-director Oliver Rihs made his debut with Blackberries back in 2002), this film’s subject, and its great overriding passion, is Berlin – a city currently unique in Europe, being at once the nation’s capital and one of its most impoverished major centres.

Through five unrelated stories, all occurring more or less simultaneously, we glimpse something of the state of the city and its inhabitants post-reunification: its uneasy synthesis of commerce and privation, its ingenuity and enterprise.

One could, if one were so inclined, detect a political allegory here: tour guide Charlotte’s verbal assault on her former classmate, now a bourgeois "Wessie" (West German) housewife, has the familiar plaint of former East Berliners against their more affluent cousins on the other side of the Wall. And one might, at a stretch, discern in the travails of Ali and his two comrades - perhaps the most desperate-to-get-laid teenagers since Lemon Popsicle – some anguished plea on the life of Turkish immigrants, the sons and daughters of the Gastarbeitern; or in Julian’s callow activism, the political and spiritual malaise of the post-Baader-Meinhof generation.

But this would be mere sophistry: a film critic’s desperate attempt to overlay a template of meaning upon something that is at heart, and by design, critic-proof. You either accept Black Sheep as it is, or not. Fact is, it’s fun, and genuinely iconoclastic: as close as anything has come, in recent years, to a genuinely Punk cinema.

Finally, a word about the credit sequence: undoubtedly the most beautiful of the year and as such, a landmark in a rapidly vanishing art.

Shot in high-contrast B&W, featuring accelerated footage of various visual landmarks (from railway station platforms to the telecommunications tower at Alexanderplatz), and scored to a superb, driving slice of funk, it communicates at least as strongly as the film, which follows it in the hectic, can-do nature of life in the metropolis.

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2006 Catalogue