Der Griller (1968)

Munich, as the youth and student revolt of 1968 begins to take shape. Franz Kaffer works at a grill restaurant near the main railway station for a rather meager income, which stands in deeply unpleasant contrast to his extensive wishes and dreams for his life in general—and, in particular, to the rent on his apartment, which he considers astronomical. Franz, a kindred spirit of Werner Enke’s Martin in *Zur Sache, Schätzchen*, wants a comfortable life free of commitments and effort, but with plenty of women and dolce far niente (Italian for “the sweet idleness”). He claims he no longer wants to work himself into the ground every day for a few marks. But unlike the members of the APO of his generation, his rejection of regular work and his passive resistance to overly bourgeois routines have no ideological aims. When a buddy asks him to take on a well-paid courier job, Franz jumps at the chance, unaware that it involves a risk that will get him into trouble with the criminal police. Franz also takes a highly pragmatic approach to love, especially free, commitment-free love. He regularly sleeps with Gisela in his sparsely furnished one-room apartment, but it does not particularly bother him that the young woman is married to someone else. Freddy, her husband, knows about Gisela’s affair with Franz, which began when he had to go abroad for work for a few years. Franz is almost glad that their arrangement is entirely free of love: to him, it means independence and ease—sex and fun without obligations or the ensuing regrets. Gisela expects no more, either; she has no intention of leaving Freddy. Franz loves his independence and dislikes being tied down, so he is less than pleased when Jutta calls. She has come from Hamburg and wants to visit him spontaneously in Munich. He met her after a concert in Hamburg and spent a night with her, without it meaning anything more to him than an ordinary one-night stand. Franz fears that her visit could mean she now wants more from him. But Jutta is rather like him: nonconformist, yet also shaped by bourgeois pragmatism. For her, as for Franz, sex is something entirely relaxed, stripped of all mystery and mythical overstatement. Accordingly, the two speak about such “delicate” topics in a casual, simply optimistic way. And yet, despite the protagonists’ pervasive enjoyment of life, it ultimately becomes clear that Franz’s dream of a comfortable, pleasant life of laisser faire (French for “letting things happen”) and laisser aller (French for “letting oneself go”) cannot be sustained in the long run, because it is bound to founder on the real circumstances of life in West German society.