Drei Eier im Glas (2015)

Bernhard “Barney” Schweinheimer’s modeling career in Vienna has hit rock bottom: successful since childhood, he now films commercials for stairlifts and sleeps in a gym. After a 25-year career, all he owns are a suitcase and a saxophone. To pawn the instrument, he visits the run-down music shop “Musikhaus Gnom.” It is run by Michael Kiesel, an alcoholic music teacher who used to play saxophone in the musical The Lion King in Hamburg. He is under the thumb of his nasty father, Meinhard, who speaks with a voice prosthesis and eats the meals Kiesel has puréed through a straw. Sipping schnapps, Kiesel watches the series “In Love with a Corpse” on his laptop, in which his crush, Heidrun Fröhlich, appears alongside a dead man with a comb-over. On his website, under the slogan “Sax up your life,” he advertises a “Saxophone Course for Singles,” which Barney attends with other lonely men. Dragan Kuhl spends his free time playing table tennis against himself in his enormous villa. The son of the “Currant Murderess,” who was sentenced to life in prison for murdering her husband and his lovers in 1977, runs a travel agency for thanatourism (“dark tourism”). Kuhl, however, has been banned from working for a year after Greenpeace sued his company and his trade association revoked his license in order to protect Austria’s reputation as a tourist destination. He also joins the saxophone course, which Kiesel’s father abruptly brings to an end. He has sold the music shop. After Kuhl and Schweinheimer pick Kiesel up drunk from the street, the three end up living together in Kuhl’s villa, sharing schnapps and rusks. They drive to Chernobyl in Kuhl’s stretch limousine, where Kiesel runs into the exclusion zone, wanting to “burn up.” The three are arrested by a soldier and locked in a cellar dungeon, from which they buy their way out. Back in Vienna, the men visit an establishment with glory holes. At the villa, Kiesel resumes the saxophone course, and the men have by now made progress and play modal jazz together. Unexpectedly, Kuhl’s mother has returned from prison. Kuhl shows Schweinheimer slides of his father’s lovers, whom his mother murdered. Kiesel cooks for the two men and has bought so-called “sizzling forks” to slow down their eating—forks that start vibrating when someone eats too quickly. Kiesel and Schweinheimer read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. The final session of the saxophone course takes place in the villa’s garden. When a rain shower begins, the men rush inside. Kiesel uploads a video of their performance to YouTube. When the three wake up the next day, it has already received more than three million views. Only then do they realize that Richard Song, a Tanzanian airport employee, suffered a heart attack and died during the performance. As a viral hit called “Dead Man Playing,” the performance brings the saxophone back into worldwide popularity. The film ends with Song’s funeral, accompanied by the three men playing their saxophones.