Robert van Ackeren dissects the relationship between two young professionals in their late thirties, and in so doing denounces, as one German critic notes, “the egoism, the emotional coldness and the inner emptiness of a whole generation.” Lisa (played by Elisabeth Trissenaar, who appears in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz and The Station Master's Wife) and Jean (Marrhias Habich) live together in imperfect harmony: well-off, liberal, intellectual, they are embarrassed by their past (passing) interest in politics, and have moved up into an urban high life in which Cuba and China are only discussed as possible vacation spots. When they bother to, they find themselves bored. From time to time they consider cures for the humdrummery of their life together--outside affairs, separate vacations and the like. But when Lisa embarks on just such a cure with a macho man she encounters shoplifting in her bookstore, the results are tumultuous for all concerned.
Writer-Director Robert van Ackeren has eight features, numerous short films and a number of festival prizes to his credit. He began his feature film career as a cinematographer for several new German directors including Rosa von Praunheim and Werner Schroeter. His style, which began in the aesthetic tradition of Warhol, has developed into something more reminiscent of the early melodramas of Claude Chabrol. German critic Wolf Donner writes of van Ackeren's “pleasure in striking exaggeration, in a playful indulgence in alienation, in a lasciviously stretched out, bombastic display of feelings....” Featured at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival.