Dieses bescheuerte Herz (2017)

Lenny, the nearly 30-year-old son of a heart specialist in Munich, lives a life of luxury. He squanders his father’s money and goes partying almost every day. After driving drunk through the closed garage door and sinking the sports car in the family swimming pool, his father cuts off his credit cards. However, he offers Lenny a chance to get them back if he looks after one of his patients. The patient is 15-year-old David, who was born with a serious heart defect, has undergone countless operations, and for whom every additional day could be the end. David attends a school at a hospice and, whenever he leaves home, has to carry a backpack with an oxygen tank. He always has to travel longer distances by ambulance. At first reluctantly, Lenny visits David and his single mother in their high-rise housing estate. Confronted for the first time with the hardships and dangers of a life-threatening illness, he has mixed feelings. He is drawn to the teenager, but is overwhelmed by the many restrictions in David’s life and by the fates of the people at the hospice. The two make a list of all the things David wants. He divides them into three levels of difficulty. The goal is to fulfill them by his upcoming 16th birthday. Lenny first sets about fulfilling David’s material wishes. These include a leather jacket, a phone, and sneakers—in other words, going shopping, which is easy for the doctor’s son to arrange. However, this leads to a life-threatening situation when Lenny loses sight of the backpack just as David urgently needs oxygen. After this shopping trip, the easy wishes on the list are taken care of, but David’s intangible wishes—such as meeting a girl, seeing his mother happy for once, and falling in love—seem almost impossible to Lenny. This, along with the incident when David had a seizure, is too much trouble for him. Lenny wants to shirk his responsibilities, go back to spending nights at the club, and have carefree sex. So he tells David that someone else should help him with the wish list now, and says, “Bye.” In response, Lenny’s father has the villa’s locks changed. Locked out, Lenny finds a place to sleep at David’s, whom he visits again after being thrown out of the family villa. As they spend more time together, the boy genuinely grows on him, and Lenny not only acts as his protector but also begins tackling David’s “impossible wishes” with cheek and imagination. To fulfill the wish “drive a sports car,” Lenny takes the car of the neighbor who bullies David and puts an end to his blocking the elevator. At a recording studio, David meets Sarah, a girl his own age from Berlin. A serious setback follows when David collapses and needs another heart operation, but he eventually recovers and, by his 16th birthday, is well enough to travel to Berlin with his mother and Lenny. There, they fulfill the last wishes on the list: a hotel suite, a limousine ride, kissing Sarah, and seeing his mother happy. Back in Munich, they celebrate his birthday once more with the family, and Lenny resumes his interrupted medical studies.