Life Is All You Get [Das Leben ist eine Baustelle]

Wolfgang Becker, Germany, 1996, 118 minutes

Jan has some problems. He just met his ex-girl-friend who may be HIV infected - oh no, actually before discovered that he was fired, because he stayed overnight in prison and didn't come to work in time. Well, the night before that, he unintentionally got messed up in a riot and was arrested. Now he has to pay about £1,000. His slutty sister wants him to move out of her flat where she lives with her obnoxious boy-friend. And his beloved niece passionately hates her mum's boy-friend.

But at least Jan met Vera, a charming street-singer, before he was arrested. And she seems to like him - even when on their first date the two are challenged with the corpse of Jan's father. As Vera has once mysteriously appeared out of the blue she disappears again.

Jan lets himself drift by life and the life is driving him. Not the individual problem is insurmountable, but the sum of conflicts seem to crush him. But Jan continues to live his life. The main characters incidentally bump into each other and other coincidences push ahead the story (yes, Run Lola Run's director Tom Tykwer has co-written the script). Although the story is very distinct, the characters still have their secrets that they keep from each other without even trying. Vera records the cutest and most creative love messages for Jan on tape, but when he wakes up in the morning she is gone.

The film's original title translates as "Life is a building site" and as is set in Berlin it fits the title perfectly well. Rather than exploring the tourist-postcard Berlin this film captures Berlin's inhabitants, their streets, their flats, their relationships and their characters. Among the mostly crappy German films produced in the 90s Life is all you get is a real gem - a film about problems that everybody eventually has: money, love, life, flat-hunting and death. For about two hours we watch the characters and don't know all about them and won't know what will become of them at the end. - Life it to exist and create; as with a building site, you can only guess what the building will look like when its finished.

Review by Sarah Stark
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2001