“Cloud 9: a state of bliss; in a euphoric state…” At various times in my life I have been on Cloud 9 and at various times I have yearned to be in that strange out-of-body but totally in touch with body state of disconnect with the world. Falling in love – it’s a time when the world goes a bit fuzzy, when you can’t concentrate, when its hard to know what you want except to see that special person. It’s dizzying and unsustainable but totally addictive. German film Cloud 9 focuses on the reactions of Inge, a seamstress in her mid 60’s who falls suddenly in lust and love with Karl who is 76. It’s a love triangle film, one which might be fairly prosaic if it were about younger people. But time is running out for all three and it is this, the performances and the utter ordinariness of the woman and her lover that makes this film really special.
We meet Inge (Ursula Werner) in her bedroom / sewing room in the heat of an East Berlin summer. She is sweaty and dishevelled, her eyes small in her middle-aged puffy face. Within minutes, she is in Karl’s flat, their faces in that classic cinema close-up that presages sex. It’s tender and lustful all at once. We’ve all felt that urgency to have sex; so much wanting it that only half the clothes come off and the feeling afterward too of “What have I done? What am I going to do now?”
Inge has a husband of 30 years, Werner (Horst Hehberg) whose hobby is listening to recordings of vintage steam trains. Their relationship seems firm and strong and for a while, Inge resists taking things further with handsome Karl (Horst Westphal). Then she tells her daughter “I always thought I would fall in love again, properly. I just gave up expecting it.” The word “properly” really got to me. There are degrees of love and I feel lucky that I have been in love “properly” a few times in my life. It was timely to watch this film; it’s easy to give up on the possibility of this happening again. Inge was brave and honest as a character; she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life as she had been living. Karl re-awakened something for her. In love, her face softened and became young again; in one scene, she looked like a nervous, trangressive teenager.
The positioning of this film, within the ‘Forbidden Pleasures' section of MIFF, seemed exploitative to me. A lot of the publicity for the film globally has been of the “check out these old people having sex” variety. The film is a drama, with the appropriate amount of sex present in any love triangle film, however unusual it is to show explicit sex between people of this age. The film deals with all the anxieties and realities of the body as it ages. The young people next to me were clearly uncomfortable with the sex scenes; they laughed or whispered whenever anything approaching a conventional love or sex scene was shown. I wanted to turn and say “this will be you. If you’re lucky” but I didn’t. Perhaps it was a good thing to watch, two weeks after my 50th birthday. Despite part of the storyline, it is a film about seizing the day in the bravest, most honest way you can. And it bravely depicted ordinary people who looked like me and they filled up the screen.
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