Paradies (1986)

There seems to be no spark left in the marriage of the average middle-class couple Viktor and Angelika Ptyza. He works as a professor of zoology and, although tension between them is usually in the air, takes care of his wife with more or less little passion. Though pampered by him and by her circumstances, Angelika is nevertheless constantly, and for some reason, out of sorts and generally dissatisfied with her life. The black lingerie he gives her for her birthday, for instance, is symptomatic of their relationship: it is a gift of (institutionalized) love and attention, but it no longer arouses any excitement in the marital partner, and the lack of passion in the conjugal bed persists. Angelika is close friends with Lotte Kovacz. Her childhood friend is the absolute opposite of the well-behaved, proper Angelika: a bit of a country minx, always on the lookout for erotic thrills. Lotte runs a general store and keeps erotic “literature” under the counter, which is clearly less about love than about pure physical pleasure. Lotte has no time for grand emotions like love anyway, because, as she sees it, “all unhappiness begins with that nonsense.” Angelika hopes Lotte will be the lifeline her dull relationship needs: with her erotic powers of seduction, she is to finally get husband Viktor going and put some life back into the weary man. But once the lively Lotte is in the house, disaster begins to unfold: the dreary husband neglects his work and follows the imported siren everywhere, even to Hamburg’s red-light district, so that Viktor now turns completely away from Angelika and toward her friend. Viktor falls so deeply in love with Lotte that, like Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrath, he leaves his former life behind and threatens to sink into the mire of prostitution in St. Pauli. What Angelika had planned as an escape from the tedium of married life and a refresher course for a marriage that had grown stale ultimately ends in an unforeseen catastrophe of unbridled passion, in which there are only losers.