Heller als der Mond

The Rumanian girl Julie comes to Vienna in the boot of a car planning to rob a bank. In Vienna she gets to know the Italian Pablo, who falls in love with her. The money in the Austrian banks is however brighter than this ‘moonshine’. The only thing that interests Julie is to get rich quick. But Pablo is a romantic who dreams of having a restaurant of his own. An empty Chinese restaurant looks like the ideal spot, certainly because it is next door to the Wiener Sparkasse. While he serves the customers, she chips a hole in the wall. As well as Julie, two other bank robbers are active, with very little success. One of them is the former Rumanian fiancé of Julie… Widrich’s finely styled feature début shows Rumania as a sad and ruined country were you can’t earn money or spend it. But the Austrians are not much better off. The team that is responsible for finding the robbers is led by the best detective in the country: A senile old man who trusts in his psychic gifts. With its restrained, ironic, black-comedy tone, Heller als der Mond has found a wonderful way to look at the topical theme of Eastern European migration to the ‘front-line state’ of Austria. The loving and dry way in which the hopeless naïvety and optimistic dreams of the protagonists are presented, is reminiscent of Fassbinder and Kaurismäki.