Meine Mutter, meine Männer (2014)

For Jenny, who is already the technical director of a Munich opera house at 30, career comes before everything else. But that could change now that she is pregnant. Her boyfriend Tobias, who is married to the family business, does not think the timing for a child is ideal, however, because he wants to finally take over the company from his father. Their relationship is strained in another way, too: after years away in Ibiza, Jenny’s fun-loving mother, Jutta, gets back in touch and intends to stay for a while. She moves in with the couple and promptly throws a proper party in their designer apartment with her old hippie friends. Tobias’s father, Roman, is her complete opposite. He has been mourning his late wife for ages and considers decorum and propriety fundamental virtues. Jutta immediately decides that someone ought to cheer him up. On a fishing trip together over the weekend, she starts flirting with him straight away. But Jenny, too, has someone who has recently been courting her: Eric, an unhappy love from her past, has been hired at short notice as the set designer for her production of The Magic Flute and is constantly vying for her attention. These turbulent circumstances thoroughly turn everyone’s lives upside down. It is not long before Jenny gets into an argument with her mother, and Jutta packs her things and moves out again. Things also turn icy between Jenny and Tobias because he puts his business dealings ahead of Jenny’s plans for a family, and he breaks up with her. In the end, Jenny gives in to Eric’s persistent advances. Meanwhile, Tobias’s father learns that he is going to be a grandfather and is delighted. He lets Jutta persuade him to go on an excursion to the mountains. He cannot resist this woman’s vivacious manner, and the two spend the night together in a mountain hut. When Jutta tells him that Tobias has split up with Jenny, he would very much like to get the two of them back together. But Jutta explains that they have to find their own way. When Jenny’s baby is born and both Tobias and Eric come to congratulate the young mother, Roman asks what this is supposed to be now. Jutta briefly explains: a patchwork family—after all, her generation invented that sort of thing.