Madame und ihre Nichte (1969)

Michelle von Obardi is a middle-aged woman who keeps a much older lover, Georg von Hallstein, a company’s managing director. As he whispers one declaration of love after another in her ear in bed, the pragmatic Madame has quite different things on her mind. Suddenly, the old man dies during lovemaking, and Michelle has to hurry back to the city from her lover’s splendid, snow-covered country estate in winter, because the dead man’s butler has dutifully informed the unfaithful husband’s wife. On the drive home in her late lover’s suitably grand chauffeur-driven Mercedes, Michelle is annoyed that she didn’t fleece Georg more while he was alive, since now she has to think more than she would like about how to finance her future. Once in Munich, Madame von Obardi goes looking for her daughter Yvette, whom she stubbornly passes off as her niece to conceal her own age. Despite the libertine outlook of girls her own age, Yvette likes to present herself as respectable, but she is nevertheless far more cunning than she lets on. Instead of studying, as her mother wants, she is at that very moment on a date with a photographer who specializes in erotic pictures. Even so, she insists: “No nude photos!” Meanwhile, Georg’s son and heir to the family fortune, Peter von Hallstein, would be a good replacement for Madame Obardi, she thinks. But he doesn’t seem particularly interested in a committed relationship, especially not with a woman considerably older than himself. The woman in her late thirties does manage to seduce Peter, but she overestimates her influence over him. What’s more, she faces some fierce competition … in the shape of her plump, considerably younger daughter—pardon, “niece.” Yvette has also set her sights on the suave young man, who is just her type. But the model, part of Munich’s high-society, air-kissing scene, discovers that her looks alone aren’t enough to make Peter von Hallstein do as she wishes. She asks the family’s close friend, Dr. Fink, for advice. Afterward, Yvette comes up with a promising strategy of her own and starts making herself interesting to Peter: one moment she plays the temptress, the next the shy “don’t-touch-me” type. Peter likes these different sides of Yvette and begins to play along. But Yvette’s strategy gets in the way of her mother’s plans, since she is determined to snag Peter as the man who will finance her future. In the end, however, youth’s beauty and cleverness prevail, and its respectability proclaims: wait until marriage to have sex. Yvette stands in her wedding dress and gives the viewer a meaningful wink from the screen.