(The title translates roughly as "Impossible Intimacy.") The highly respected editor Dagmar Hirtz proves herself to be an equally incisive director in her first feature, which is co-written by Margarethe von Trotta. In telling of a woman filmmaker (Kathrin Ackermann) who in her personal life is torn between a suicidal friend, a lover who feels neglected and a son long ago abandoned in America, Hirtz creates "an intense story of the emotional sterility of young German singles, with interesting observations on the love/hate relationship of Germans toward America.... The predictable anxiety of the New German Cinema is present but laced with ironic counterpoint.... (In this) portrait of alienated adults clinging to the values of the 1960s...dialogue is meaningful and ably delivered from characters who have something to say to a generation that may have found other group portraits of 'The Big Chill' generation shallow or insufficient" ("Kaja", Variety).