Kammerflimmern

What do you win every time you run a yellow light with your right hand pressed against the roof of the car? Two minutes of good sex – and it’s cumulative too! That is the last thing that ‘Crash’ (Schweighöfer) learned as a child from his parents, before their car went out of control, tires screeching. Crash survived, but was left with a trauma, his name and a scar on his face. He grew up and became an angelic paramedic with an unstoppable urge to save people. His life is empty, until the very pregnant November (Schwarz) makes an emergency call one day because her boyfriend has taken an overdose. Kammerflimmern is a beautiful example of the recent renaissance of German cinema that may have started with Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt (1998). No Holocaust dramas or post-Fassbinders, but films about fresh, vital, contemporary, un-bourgeois Germany. In his début, Hölzemann combines a plethora of styles with great suppleness and fantasy. Dream, reality and being drugged to the eyeballs converge in a surprising, striking and often humorous cut. The German title is derived from the powerful heart-rhythm shock caused by a defibrillator: a physical state of emergency that is the leitmotif throughout this unconventional love story. Kammerflimmern is a high-speed film about life and death and finding yourself in yourself and in others. And just when the two minutes of good sex are over, the film ends in an unexpected and symbolic climax. (SdH)