Love, Money, Love (2000)
Director: Philip Gröning
Country: Germany
Runtime: 2 hours, 7 minutes
L'amour, l'argent, l'amour: a discourse, you should think, on the economy of love. Which it is and is not. It narrates and relates economy and love, but very soon moves outside any established economical orders. The story seems, at first sight, deeply rooted in cliché. We have a whore with the name, of all names, Marie and we have David. a young man with a right arm in plaster and no job. She asks him if he wants to sleep with her, but he has no money. From which results love, in a way. She takes him home, we see them awake naked, together, but he didn't sleep with her. I will leave, he says, but he does not say where. Will you come, he asks, and she wouldn't know why. But they go, they leave Berlin, in her car, they go somewhere, they drift along, you see streets and trees, faces and landscapes, cityscapes and lights in superimposition and it's in these superimpositions (with the additional layer of music by The Velvet Underground and Calexico and other kinds of beautiful melancholy) that you realize that cliché is only to what you can, if you wish, reduce what you see. But then you have to ignore that you see so much more than cliché, or less. ~ Ekkehard Knörer
Country: Germany
Runtime: 2 hours, 7 minutes
L'amour, l'argent, l'amour: a discourse, you should think, on the economy of love. Which it is and is not. It narrates and relates economy and love, but very soon moves outside any established economical orders. The story seems, at first sight, deeply rooted in cliché. We have a whore with the name, of all names, Marie and we have David. a young man with a right arm in plaster and no job. She asks him if he wants to sleep with her, but he has no money. From which results love, in a way. She takes him home, we see them awake naked, together, but he didn't sleep with her. I will leave, he says, but he does not say where. Will you come, he asks, and she wouldn't know why. But they go, they leave Berlin, in her car, they go somewhere, they drift along, you see streets and trees, faces and landscapes, cityscapes and lights in superimposition and it's in these superimpositions (with the additional layer of music by The Velvet Underground and Calexico and other kinds of beautiful melancholy) that you realize that cliché is only to what you can, if you wish, reduce what you see. But then you have to ignore that you see so much more than cliché, or less. ~ Ekkehard Knörer
