Drei Herren (1998)

Three inmates of a psychiatric institution in Austria are to be transferred. Before they set off, the institution’s attendant warns the three gentlemen that he does not want to hear any complaints about them. During the journey, however, the bus driver suffers a heart attack and lung failure and steers the bus into a ditch. The three passengers escape and set off on foot for a nearby village. Mr. Dölken has suffered from chronic insomnia for decades, and collects recordings of many people sleeping. Mr. Ivo lost his family in a car accident. He speaks only broken German and always carries a goldfish in a glass bowl and postcards from all over Europe. The story of the third escapee, Sichel, remains a mystery: he does not say a word, carries a magnifying glass, and eats only his sausage roll. Mr. Sichel carries the unconscious driver on his back. The three arrive in the village separately and therefore attract no particular attention. A so-called “key man” is constantly on the move there, locking and unlocking doors. Mr. Dölken enters the home of an old woman who is asleep, intending only to record her sleeping sounds. The elderly Frau Gstettner mistakes Dölken for her son and believes he has returned home from the war. Dölken soon settles in with her. During a funeral, Mr. Ivo enters the village church and leaves with a runaway pig. But the altar boy Wolfi smiles at Mr. Ivo. Ivo also compares the village’s modest buildings with the magnificent structures on his postcards. Mr. Sichel goes into the inn, where he finds the goulash prepared for the funeral meal and devours it with enormous appetite. Meanwhile, the gendarmes have got wind of the three men’s escape and meet Kamilla, who has been watching Sichel through the window. But Kamilla cannot give them any information about three escapees. Afterward, Kamilla and Mr. Sichel become friends. In the meantime, the funeral procession has difficulty crossing the main road. The man being buried is the carpenter Rudi Giesshübl. During the eulogy, a boy named Fritz asks altar boy Wolfi to steal the village chapel’s relic as a test of courage. Wolfi refuses. The funeral cannot be completed because a heavy rain begins. Fearing that her son will have her committed to a care home, Frau Gstettner flees with Dölken to the luxurious house of the late Rudi Giesshübl, though Dölken does not know why. Fritz persuades Wolfi to take the relic—the finger of St. Pancras—from its shrine. It soon becomes clear that the villagers have far greater psychological problems than the people supposedly suffering from mental illness. Mayor Gstettner—the old Frau Gstettner’s actual son—finds that his mother is not at the farm and flies into a rage. He now organizes a kind of vigilante group in the village, which hunts the three escapees while armed. Since nobody knows what they look like, however, the three continue to go unnoticed. Dölken, Ivo, and Sichel now live peacefully in the late Rudi Giesshübl’s house. From time to time, the unconscious driver briefly comes to. When the village youths are about to begin the hunt, Wolfi hands Fritz the relic finger. Fritz puts it in his pocket. Shortly afterward, Wolfi asks for it back, but the finger crumbles. Wolfi now has to summon all his courage to get a replacement finger quickly. During the hunt, a policeman’s finger is accidentally shot off. Ivo’s pig eats it. Mr. Ivo already knows about the broken finger, too, because Wolfi keeps asking him for a new one, but Ivo says no. Wolfi tries to cut a finger off the dead Rudi Giesshübl and opens the grave, but Dölken catches him. Kamilla drags Mr. Sichel to her father’s farm, where her father takes him for the new farmhand. While Sichel is working, the search party asks about the three escapees. Sichel silently claims that he has seen them, even though he is one of the three himself. Sichel and Peter, the search party’s leader, get into a fight, which Kamilla stops by claiming that she and Peter had been lovers. Mr. Dölken discovers a box of bottle caps at the farm and is delighted. He then opens many bottles in order to collect lots of identical caps to trade. Mr. Ivo tells Wolfi about the accident he had with his family. The hunt for the escapees seems to have succeeded, because the vigilantes capture the wrong three people and tie them to the village square’s tree. They turn out to be the notary, his assistant, and the chauffeur. The notary reads Rudi Gießhübl’s will to the community, revealing that Frau Gstettner had been having an affair with Rudi and inherited his house. Meanwhile, Kamilla and Sichel are caught kissing, and her father locks them in a wine cellar. Sichel proposes to Kamilla, and she accepts. The old Frau Gstettner dies, and Mr. Dölken mourns her as though she had been his mother. Her funeral is arranged so that her open coffin is placed in the stream and is meant to float all the way to the Black Sea, since Frau Gstettner had never seen the sea. Kamilla and Sichel—whom Kamilla calls “Bärli”—marry quietly at night in the chapel, with no guests, but Wolfi hides behind the altar during the ceremony. His search for a finger ends with him setting the chapel on fire, and Ivo has to rescue him because the key man has locked the door. On their wedding night, Kamilla thinks that Bärli (Mr. Sichel) has given her a little fire with a firefly, but it is actually the burning chapel. As the villagers put out the fire, they suspect the three lunatics of starting it. The next morning, the chauffeur comes to and gathers the three up. The bus is decorated like a wedding car, and before they leave, Mr. Sichel speaks for the first time, calling for Kamilla because she has not come. But during the journey she jumps onto the bus’s rear ladder, and Sichel is happy. By the time the true identities of the three gentlemen are revealed, they have already traveled on to another village.