Heimkino acht

I read a few very positive reviews for this film, although I also saw it was "in the style of You've Got Mail", so I should have been more wary.  As it was, I ended up unimpressed.

SPOILERS

A Linguistics professor gets dumped by his girlfriend and at the same time begins to receive emails from an "E. Röthe", who wants to cancel a magazine subscription.  The emails become more and more upset as they appear to be ignored, and finally Leo writes back to say they have the wrong address.  Later he gets a generic Christmas wish email and responds thanking them for their spam.  This gets answered with, "Passive aggressive idiot."  And so the game begins.  E stands for Emma, but a slip of the finger makes her Emmi in their conversations.  They start a kind of flirtation even though Emmi is married with two step-children, and supposedly happy.  Leo tries to get over his ex-girlfriend, who pops up from time to time for sex and disappears again, but when he goes out with women his sister sets him up with, he can't stop thinking about his next message to Emmi.  Emmi also starts to get more caught up in their virtual relationship, and starts seeing the deficiencies in her relationship with her husband.  He is a respected orchestra conductor and spends a lot of time at rehearsals or in performance, while she gives piano lessons and works as a magazine editor, I think, from home.  They almost meet by design in a coffee shop but don't recognize each other yet.  Then, they almost run into each other in a supermarket, but Leo gets a call from his sister that their mother is in the hospital.  He is offline for a few days looking after her, and then taking care of the funeral.  He did not have a close relationship with his mother, so he is maybe more upset by the loss of opportunity to improve the relationship than the loss of a relationship itself.  His sister scolds him for this, too, saying their mother said he was the most like her because both of them kept the people they claimed to love at arm's length.  Leo starts to want a "real" relationship with Emmi, who resists because she doesn't want to rock the boat with her family.  She has a strong relationship with her stepchildren, and even though her husband seems preoccupied with his work, they seem to have a loving relationship.  She even tells her stepdaughter that when they met he took her breath away.  But, after some prodding, she starts to wonder if she could have a great love story with a stranger and she and Leo make plans to meet.  Then, Leo gets an email from her husband.  He asks Leo to have a night with his wife, to destroy the fantasy that they have built together, so that he can fight for her as a reality against a reality.  Leo hesitates, feeling guilty, but eventually continues with their plans.  At the same time, he organizes a transfer to a university in New York, so the meeting would be a goodbye anyway.  Emmi gets ready to go to see Leo and says goodbye to her husband, who tells her to have a good time, as she expects.  What she doesn't expect is that he calls her Emmi, which tells her that he knows everything.  She goes back to her bedroom and sits on the bed until late into the night, missing the date with Leo.  Then, at some early hour of the morning, she puts on her coat and shoes and rushes out the door, driving desperately to Leo's place, just making it before he gets in a taxi to the airport to fly off to his new American life.  They see each other for the first time and smile.

It could have been and interesting story, examining the ways people try to protect themselves from disappointment and pain, settling for something safe but unexciting, taking partners for granted, or getting caught in a cycle of the grass is always greener.  Instead, Leo's sister tells him that he never lets people in when we have seen him ready to marry his ex-girlfriend.  Emmi has a warm relationship with her husband and never lets on that she regrets any opportunities she has missed by marrying him and taking care of his kids.  The part about not being able to compete with a fantasy as a real person rings true, but since it comes at the very end of the movie it isn't explored.  We might imagine that Leo and Emmi see each other and then go their own separate ways to continue the fantasy, or the most Hollywood of endings could happen, where she joins him, with no luggage or anything, on his move to New York and they live happily ever after.  I much preferred Meine Ende, dein Anfang.

Some might say I should have had a gose ready with this movie, since I'm so salty about it.  So luck there, just a weissbier.  It's Andechs, in one those nice, big half liter bottles, to take the bad taste of a disappointing movie out of your mouth.  This is a fruitier beer than a lot of German ones I've had, with hints of banana and apple popping up here and there.  It's also fairly sweet in aroma, with sort of a cakey smell to it.  It's on the heavy side, filling, and better company on a summer evening than some movies.