Venusberg (1963)

Seven very different women accept an invitation from the gynecologist Alphonse to his villa, which serves as a holiday home and sits high on a snow-covered hill. Each of them has had, or still has, an affair with him, yet the man around whom everything revolves remains absent. His current lover Ruth, who had received his promise that he would divorce for her sake, waits for the doctor, as does Pony, his longtime girlfriend, who has been engaged for four years with no prospect of marriage. Also there are Vera, a lesbian medical student, and her girlfriend Christine, as well as Inge, who is three months pregnant. Then there is Lola, a model from Paris who is willing to marry the highest bidder, and Florentine, who takes nothing too seriously. The women’s conversations meander in different combinations across topics such as love, men, and women, while the line between self-determination and the question of how to catch a (wealthy) man remains blurred. Ultimately, with its rather forced-feeling resolution of a narrative, the film comes across dramatically as a shallow attempt to transplant the ideas of the Nouvelle Vague to Germany. The conversations range in subject from abortions to Simone de Beauvoir and Gottfried Benn, whose erotic passages Vera recites. When a man sneaks around the house and makes his presence known, one of the women lets him in and then has sex with him while the others listen from the next room. In the end, Ruth realizes that her “prince charming” is not the right man for her and voluntarily gives up on a future and marriage with Alphonse. Then the women leave, one after another. The film unintentionally reflects the conventional social attitudes of its time.