Weihnachts-Männer (2015)

On Christmas Eve, three “Santas” are arrested by the Munich police, who believe they are members of the long-sought Santa Claus gang. Their plan had indeed been to break into a house that day dressed as Santas, but their aim was not to steal anything; it was to return something. But they do not dare simply admit this to the female commissioner during questioning. Since the interrogating commissioner, Karolin Bremer, is actually in a hurry to get home in time for the gift-giving, she tries every means at her disposal to get the three men to confess. This leads each of them to reveal his life story, more or less at length. Fritz, a widowed pediatrician at a hospital, has recently found himself attracted to a colleague, but he is plagued by guilt because he still dreams about his late wife and feels as though he is being unfaithful to her. That is relatively harmless, however, compared with veterinarian Walter’s exhausting double life. In addition to his wife and daughter in Munich, he has a fiancée and a baby in Salzburg. With considerable ingenuity, he is constantly rushing back and forth between the two women, neither of whom has yet become suspicious. The situation changes when he has to tell his fiancée that he cannot be with her at Christmas for “professional reasons.” Then the forceful father of his girlfriend in Salzburg also announces that he expects Walter and his daughter to marry in the summer. Walter backs out and disappears. Back in Munich, he realizes he cannot keep up this stressful life much longer. But since he simply cannot choose between the two women, he has no solution to his problem. Andi thinks little of work that requires paying taxes, but he is not really a criminal. To illustrate this, he too tells his touching story. Short of money, he had gradually taken small items from his girlfriend’s apartment to the pawnbroker to get money for his horse-race bets. After he also came across an antique music box that meant a great deal to his girlfriend, she promptly threw Andi out. With the help of his friends Fritz and Walter, Andi’s plan to buy back the music box and secretly put it back in his girlfriend’s room succeeds. But just as Andi has placed the box under his girlfriend’s Christmas tree, the police arrive and arrest all three of them. Once the three men’s innocence has been established, they are released from questioning. Andi makes up with his girlfriend, who has hurried to the police station, and Fritz gets a happy ending too, as his colleague confesses that she loves him. Only Walter still does not know what to do when his wife arrives to pick him up, and his girlfriend from Salzburg turns up with her father as well, so the two women learn about Walter’s double life. Afraid that he will have to choose, he would rather run away again.