(Translation title: Not Nothing Without You.) A comedy, not of manners, but of quirks, this is a film that delights in the angst of an uncomfortable generation: the children of the fifties, living on the fringe in the eighties. Martha, at 25, is a single mother, a painter, a filmmaker, artistic, impulsive, insecure, happy, and unhappy. Financially well off through no fault of her own, her biggest problem, as she sees it, is her superficiality-but she's working on that. (She longs to be one with the poor and to that end shares her flat with a family of politically active Portuguese immigrants.) Then there is Alfred, a decade older than Martha and all the more lost for it; he always seems to have misplaced something...something he thought he'd taken with him, back in '68. Martha can't cut it with men, Alfred likewise with women; they are made for each other. Told in short sweet episodes that, together, make up a narrative, Noisy Martha is a lot like its heroine (played by director Pia Frankenberg): personal, intimate, sincere, bluesy and upbeat at the same time, neurotic in a harmless kind of way-and epitomizing, as it rebels against, the "retreat into the private" that the eighties represent. Cinematography, in black-and-white, by Thomas Mauch is exquisite-painterly in capturing Martha and Alfred in the little corners of their worlds, then verité-like in seeking out the teetering hilarity of Hamburg streetlife.