Das Love-Hotel in Tirol (1978)

The twin brothers Peter and Paul Berger are extremely alike in appearance but completely different in character. When they inherit a run-down holiday hotel in Tyrol from their late uncle, they naturally have completely different ideas about what to do with the vacant building. One of them, Paul Berger, earns his living in Munich as a stuffy chief accountant and wants to turn the hotel into a Christian meeting place for young convent students. The other, Peter Berger, is a well-traveled charmer and inveterate womanizer, who intends to transform the hotel into a semi-erotic “meeting place” for sensual Asian women and affluent German and Austrian clientele. Confusion ensues because both brothers initially keep their plans to themselves, so neither knows what the other intends. And the idea of an institute shaped by Catholic values, devoted to the moral and spiritual edification of young people, is miles removed from the concept of a love hotel with half- or fully naked Thai girls. Various amusing complications that follow are based on the twins-and-lookalikes premise: for example, since no one can really tell the brothers apart, Paul and Peter’s ideas are approved by the “wrong” people. Thus, the local priest unknowingly endorses Peter’s erotic plans because he thinks he is talking to Paul and his plan for a Christian meeting place, while Paul’s thoroughly conservative approach keeps running into obstacles and objections. A group of young convent students, who are supposed to spend more time here with God than with the village’s lusty young men, also expects much more from the love hotel than spiritual edification alone. The gay electrician André and neglected or jealous wives round out the cast of characters surrounding the love hotel. Finally, the hotel’s reopening takes place—an event the people of the small Tyrolean village of Hinterbrunn are unlikely to forget any time soon…