Väter allein zu Haus: Gerd (2019)

Gerd Frick, a passionate home renovator, owns a small trades business and has three daughters by three different women. He promised his partner, Michaela, that as soon as their daughter Laura started school, he would take over caring for her so Michaela could return to her job as a nurse. Gerd has proposed to Michaela more than once, but she has never accepted. She has promised him that she will finally say yes if he fulfills his responsibilities as a responsible father and considerate homemaker to her satisfaction. Michaela suggests that Gerd sell his small business, which is not doing so well anyway. “So I’m supposed to give everything up?” Gerd says. “Exactly what I’ve been doing these past few years,” Michaela replies. On the very first day of school, an incident causes the mothers of the children involved to become alarmed. Gerd hands his daughter Laura the car key, and in an unsupervised moment she invites other children into her father’s car and causes a rear-end collision in the schoolyard. The principal summons Gerd and his friends, but cannot make sense of their bizarre arguments and gives up in resignation. At home, another unpleasant surprise awaits Gerd: Michaela tells him that she would rather not marry him after all. He has already wrecked two marriages, she says, and she does not want to be the third failed relationship on his list. Gerd’s new friend Timo Savona has other troubles: his relationship with his wife, Nicki, has fallen apart. She is now with his manager. Timo used to be a professional footballer. The couple have three children together—the twins Tom and Louis, and little Lilly—and they continue to care for them together. When Lilly was staying with him, her cuddly toy rabbit, which she cannot fall asleep without, went missing. Now Timo is searching for it. Gerd helps him get it back. Nicki is impressed when Gerd shows up at her door with the rabbit. Gerd meets real-estate agent Renate Maurer, who makes him reconsider his decision to focus solely on the household and childcare. Then his 17-year-old daughter Nele, whom he thought was in Australia, turns up at his door, heavily pregnant. When Gerd goes to confront the father of Nele’s child, he finds a distraught minor whom Nele has left behind and whom she had only used because his older brother, Lukas, was not interested in her. Since Nele does not want to go to her mother, Gerd fixes up the garden house for her, where, with Michaela’s consent, she can stay for now, at least until her baby is born. When Gerd invites Michaela to dinner and the opera, even though he himself finds opera rather tedious, she is pleasantly surprised. She is even more surprised when they arrive at the closed venue but are still let in. Timo, Mark, and Andreas are already in the theater auditorium; together with them, Gerd has planned this surprise for Michaela. From the stage, Gerd speaks to Michaela, eloquently telling her how much she means to him, and finally drops to one knee to ask her once again if she will be his wife. Michaela is deeply moved, and this time her answer is “Yes.”