Max Färberböck - Aimee and Jaguar (1)

It is one of the secrets of the creative process that a bunch of people who sound like they haven't the first glimpse of what they are doing, or why, can produce something profound and moving. Comparing, in this case, the cast and crew interviews on the DVD with the movie itself, the dichotomy couldn't be greater. Where the movie is a masterpiece for so many reasons and in so many ways (and in spite of its occasionally stilted acting in the tradition of the German Kleines Fernsehspiel), the comments of the people who made it fall amazingly short. Most telling was Maria Schrade, who in the space of under two minutes mentioned no less than six times that the fact that it was a lesbian lovestory didn't matter at all. Form and function, quite at odds, but thanks for the effort.
When Brokeback Mountain made it big recently, some German critic complained how utterly unthinkable a like movie would be in a German setting - two male blue collar workers in the Ruhrgebiet getting it on - the opposite of cool and moving (I'm transcribing liberally here)(which, funny enough, is just one little typo away from literally, as I just discovered). But Aimee and Jaguar is that movie, and both the fact that it tells a true story, and the backdrop of the apocalyptic insanity of Berlin during the end of the Second World War, heighten the intensity of its message. I don't want to compare Brokeback Mountain and Aimee and Jaguar to each other, both movies are great achievements in their own right, but I do think they should have the right to marry each other and have lots of kids. I'd love to see them.