MAYBE...MAYBE NOT
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Til Schweiger, Joachim Krol, Katja Riemann, Rufus Beck. Screenplay: Sonke Wortmann. Director: Sonke Wortmann. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Of all the things I might claim to understand about movies, I suspect that what makes a given film popular with American audiences will never be one of them. With that in mind, what makes a film popular with non-American audiences ranks somewhere with "what is the sound of one hand clapping" on my personal scale of philosophical inscrutability. Many is the film which has come to these shores trumpeted as "one of the most popular films ever in (fill-in-native-country), and it seems that for every ONCE WERE WARRIORS (a record-breaker in New Zealand) there is a THE MYSTERY OF RAMPO (last year's Japanese smash which turned out to be a bit of psychedelic soft-core porn). Now comes the German hit MAYBE...MAYBE NOT ("Die Bewegte Mann" in Europe), a silly and fairly aimless sex farce which provides a sexy star with very little to do.
That star is Til Schweiger, who plays a randy waiter-cum-photographer named Axel Feldheim. Though he lives with girlfriend Doro (Katja Riemann), Axel has a tendency to stray, and when Doro catches him in the act, Axel finds himself out on the street. His search for a place to stay brings him to the attention of Waltraud (Rufus Beck), a flamboyant drag queen who longs to seduce the handsome but hetero Axel. Axel, however, is on to Waltraud, and opts to stay with Waltraud's more reserved but just as gay friend Norbert (Joachim Krol). As it turns out, Norbert is also just as interested in Axel, and makes his intentions quite apparent. Thus begins a series of misunderstandings in which Axel's attempts to patch up his relationship with Doro are complicated by her believe that he may not be cheating on her with women only.
Writer/director Sonke Wortmann has created an erratic comedy which swings back and forth from being an airy trifle to half-heartedly attempting genuine character development. The opening twenty minutes promise plenty of broad laughs, from Doro's discovery of Axel and a lady-friend in a bathroom stall to Waltraud's frantic attempts to look remove his drag costume so as not to scare off Axel. Gradually, however, Wortmann begins trying to generate sympathy for his characters. Norbert, whose relationships always seem to be disasters, moons over Axel; Axel himself experiences the other side of sexual predation in the bathroom of a gay bar. It appears as though Wortmann is setting up some lessons for our two protagonists to learn from each other -- Norbert will learn to make better romantic choices, and Axel will become a more faithful partner to Doro.
Then MAYBE...MAYBE NOT makes a jarring U-turn back to unapologetic, bawdy slapstick, and throws any pretense at character out the window. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, particularly because the character developments were looking fairly obvious, except that the comic situations of the last half hour are equally obvious, and not very funny. In one scene, Norbert, Waltraud and Norbert's extremely butch lover (Armin Rohde) are annoyed in a theater by three youths who walk into "A Death in Venice" believing it's going to be "Rambo;" in another, Axel's tryst with an old flame (Antonia Lang) becomes another chance for Doro to catch him in an awkward position. Wortmann directs it all with a sluggish inevitability, and takes a final turn back to sentimentality which suggests that he was just making the whole thing up as he went along.
The chiseled-cheeked Schweiger has become a superstar in Germany as a result of this role, and outside of his obvious sex appeal, I can't quite see why. He tries to give Axel a boyish charm to counteract his incomprehensible shifts in personality, but he is the prototype pretty face with little spark. Similarly, Joachim Krol's award-winning role seems remarkably shallow, and shows that America doesn't have a monopoly on befuddling acting honors. The problem I had with both roles, and with MAYBE...MAYBE NOT as a whole, was that there seemed to be no point to any of it, no growth of character, and some unappealing messages. Every male character is perpetually horny, Axel is just as big a jerk when the film ends as he was when it started, and we are reassured that everything will be fine because Doro will continue to be a door-mat and forgive Axel's philandering yet again. Perhaps it's just a cultural gap I was unable to cross, but MAYBE...MAYBE NOT struck me as only sporadically amusing, and sometimes flat-out irritating. Which is why I will never make my living deciding what movies get made.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Deutsch mocks: 4.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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