5 Zimmer, Küche, Bad (1992)

Health insurance employee Hartwig Klemmnitz urgently looks for a new apartment for himself and his wife, Regine, because their landlord has claimed it for his own use. At an apartment viewing, he meets Pia Janzen, a young dancer who is currently staying in a cheap hotel and cannot find an apartment she can afford. When Pia scratches the banker's limousine while backing her old 2CV out of a parking space, he does not ask her to pay for the damage; instead, he invites her to dinner. By chance, Hartwig's wife Regine is Castellotti's secretary. Hartwig runs into Pia again at a real estate agent's office and shortly afterward visits her in her hotel room. Since her car is being repaired, he offers to look for an apartment together with her—but keeps quiet about the fact that he is married and is not looking for an apartment just for himself. After the two of them have bad luck several times, Pia comes up with the idea that at their next viewings they should pretend to be a prosecutor and his wife. Friedmann, a retired prosecutor who is staying in a room next to Pia's, is supposed to help Hartwig dress and behave appropriately. Hartwig is a very upright man and agrees to the scam only reluctantly. Meanwhile, Regine has gone to a real estate agent on her own and is offered an apartment. But just as she is viewing it with the agent, two other prospective tenants turn up—namely Hartwig and Pia, “disguised” as Prosecutor Bartholdy and his wife. Regine leaves the apartment, saying, “You bastard!” She throws Hartwig out of their shared home, and he moves into the cheap hotel, into the room across from Pia's. There, at night, he hears Pia being brought home by Castellotti and becomes jealous. The next morning he wants to confront her, but she makes it clear that he has no right to interfere in her relationships. Regine brings Hartwig's things to his hotel room and runs into Pia there. She warns Pia about Castellotti: he has seduced young women several times before, always using the same trick, and then left them. Meanwhile, through old contacts, the retired prosecutor discovers that Schnieker, the owner of the apartment Hartwig and Pia want, is in cahoots with Castellotti: they want to bribe the supposed Prosecutor Bartholdy with the apartment on favorable terms in order to obtain confidential information from the prosecutor's office. Hartwig goes along with the plan and meets Schnieker and Castellotti as Bartholdy to sign the contract. But Regine unexpectedly shows up at the meeting and, of course, recognizes him. Castellotti invites Pia to spend a weekend at a luxury hotel. She accepts and pretends to let him seduce her. At night, she enters his hotel room in handcuffs and a leather outfit she has borrowed from a prostitute, another resident of the cheap hotel. She handcuffs Castellotti to the bed and drives back into town in his car. Regine, who now knows about Hartwig and Pia's scam, has followed Pia and Castellotti, apparently to warn him. She frees Castellotti from the handcuffs and tries to persuade him to finally commit to a steady relationship—with her. Now that Schnieker has also found out that he was taken in by a fake prosecutor, he lets the rental agreement fall through. But thanks to Friedmann, Hartwig and Pia are only out on the street for a very short time: he has a five-room apartment where he lived with his wife for 32 years. He left it after his wife died three months ago because he did not want to be alone in the huge apartment. But now he offers Hartwig and Pia the chance to live there with him in a kind of multigenerational shared household. When Pia calls Hartwig at work the next day, they finally confess their love for each other.