Herz (2001)

The film is set against the backdrop of Cologne. A diving school is the meeting point for the intertwined destinies it tells. A group of friends from the small neighborhood meets at the school to escape the daily grind and get some distance from the problems each of them carries around. One of them is Martin, who works as a doctor. The film opens with a young woman’s suicide attempt, and Martin manages to save her just in time. But his attempt to make contact with her after she regains consciousness fails. The girl remains silent, and the reason she wanted to take her own life remains a mystery to the ambitious doctor. Georg, who works in the homicide division, is also confronted with death. On his first wedding anniversary—which his friends have to remind him about—he is on call and is promptly summoned to a murder scene. It has long been clear to everyone that his marriage to Gisela is in tatters. She is increasingly repulsed by Georg’s “corpse hands,” all the more so when he takes her to the crime scene and she is confronted with the body, whose sight she cannot bear. Cem has a problem of the opposite kind. He works as a court interpreter, where he meets the defendant, Lale, and falls in love with her. Lale, however, is in a relationship. Nevertheless, Cem cannot control his feelings. During the trial, he translates the plaintiff’s statements in her favor. He then gets in touch with Lale’s boyfriend and pretends to be her brother. He threatens him in an effort to break them up, and at first this succeeds. The sales representative Günther has nothing to do with this group; he merely lives in the building across from the school and is often away for work. So often, in fact, that in the meantime his wife Marlies has started an affair with Marcel, the diving instructor. When Günther learns that his company is on the verge of bankruptcy and that he is losing his job, he abruptly cuts short his trip and finds his young daughter home alone, staring through the window at the diving school. This is how Günther learns about his wife’s affair. In this way, the destinies of different people are linked and entwined through the diving school. While Georg and Gisela’s marriage cannot be saved after their botched anniversary, Günther manages to put aside the thoughts of revenge that he initially pictured when he saw his wife with another man. Cem, on the other hand, has to realize that his rash actions were less effective than he had imagined. In the end, it is only thanks to his deep, sincere love that he manages to win Lale’s heart after all. The film thus shows the different ways the characters try to cope with and overcome their problems. The young woman is the one left behind: she runs away from the hospital, but at home finds only a mother ravaged by drug use, who greets her with accusations and emotional coldness instead of love and compassion. Natalie’s second suicide attempt succeeds, and it also plunges the doctor Martin into a crisis of meaning, as he feels partly responsible for her death.