Unter Frauen (2012)

The handsome macho car salesman Alexander Hagen feels invincible as a womanizer and arrogant playboy. He fires the cleaning lady at the car dealership where he works and is rude to women passing by. After a gas explosion in his apartment, he wakes up in a hospital where there seem to be only female nurses and doctors. The impression does not fade even after he leaves the hospital. All the passersby and other people—including colleagues and acquaintances—have suddenly become women. Even his best friend since childhood, Silvio, is now a (fully) female Silvia (Fahri Yardım in the film’s only cross-dressing role). It seems that Alex has now been plunged into an exclusively female parallel world. Parallel worlds are a general theoretical construct that Silvio has been telling him about since childhood, and Alex now discusses them with Silvia, who is, in principle, unable to understand his confusion, in the hope of finding a way out. In this world full of misunderstandings and strangeness, he turns to the only person besides Silvio/Silvia who seems trustworthy to him: the shy opera prop maker Paula, whom he treated rudely in his old world, but does not in the parallel world. Paula has a grandmother who happens to be the very cleaning lady he once fired. She is old and frail, and at Paula’s request—Paula is the woman Alex desires—he takes care of her. A friendship develops between the old woman and Alex, making him noticeably more emotional. At his old company, too, his now deliberately more considerate behavior toward his colleagues—all women—makes him well-liked. When Anni, the grandmother, dies in his arms, he makes her a final promise to take care of Paula. Determined to keep this promise in this seemingly inescapable world of women, he climbs onto a high bridge in Düsseldorf and plans to castrate himself with a rope and a brick he throws down. Silvia learns of his plan during a phone call with Alex shortly beforehand and happens to speed her car right underneath the bridge pier, thereby slowing the brick’s fall to the ground. Alex keeps his genitals, and Silvia has suddenly become the old Silvio again—the parallel world has apparently dissolved. Alex runs to Paula, who knows him only as a boor (now that he is back in the right world). But after they suddenly realize that they may already have met as children, they form a new, deep friendship.