Berlin Blues

Berlin Blues (Herr Lehmann, 2003) is a German tragicomedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Leander Haußmann. It's autumn 1989 in West Berlin's Kreuzberg, and a bartender everyone calls Herr Lehmann is coasting through his last carefree weeks before the concrete comes down. Christian Ulmen plays the lead.

Frank is nearly thirty and perfectly content: a shift behind the bar, a beer at the place across the street where his friend Karl works, and a slow, half-hearted thing with Katrin the cook. He flatly refuses to care about anything beyond his SO 36 neighborhood. Then it all tilts at once — his parents drop in, Katrin slips away, Karl turns odd, and over on the other side of the Wall history is quietly winding up to flip the whole city. A young Christoph Waltz turns up in a small role.

Haußmann adapts Sven Regener's much-loved novel and nails its tone exactly — boozy, lazy, fondly ironic — the mood of a generation that more or less slept through the end of an era. The big events stay in the background; up front are the small disasters of one aimless guy. It suits anyone who likes low-key European comedies that are sad in precise proportion to how funny they are. Stream Berlin Blues (2003) online on iFILM.