CLOUD 9
Directed by Andreas Dresen
Produced by Peter Rommel
Written by Dresen, Cooky Ziesche, Laila Stieler & Jörg Hauschild
Released by Music Box Films
German with English subtitles
USA. 91 min. Not Rated
With Ursula Werner, Horst Rehberg, Horst Westphal & Steffi Kühnert
 

Cloud 9 tells a universal story of lust, love, and infidelity that in its bare outline could be like many movies about romantic triangles. But the three people caught in this maelstrom are not experiencing puppy love, the twentysomething dating scene, the seven-year itch, or even the empty nest syndrome.

Inge (Ursula Werner) is a 67-year-old seamstress, and when she decides to deliver pants she’s altered to 76-year-old Karl (Horst Westphal), she unexpectedly alters her life too. Their spontaneous afternoon delight is so passionate, and filmed with full-frontal nudity, that it’s a shock when she leaves his bed to go home—to her husband, Werner (Horst Rehberg).

While director Andreas Dresen’s previous features with the superb Ursula Werner and Horst Westphal have not been released overseas, his Summer in Berlin, about a much younger triangle of two women and a man, also gradually revealed that characters and their relationships were not simple or predictable. When Inge fondly visits with her grown daughter, Petra (Steffi Kühnert), and grandchildren, her 30-year marriage is disclosed as a rescue from an earlier failed romantic relationship.

Dresen’s intimate, naturalistic style is key to how absorbing and convincing Cloud 9 is. This is a film less about words (his production notes cite only one page of dialogue in the first half hour) and more about feelings, images, and sounds. Background about the characters’ long lives only comes out gradually and subtly.

Werner is retired from a railroad career (he listens to recordings of train whistles just like the Norwegian railroad retiree in the recent O’Horten), so train sounds serve as a constant reminder for him wherever Inge is away, and she is never far from busy railroad tracks. Karl prefers nature, so sparkling sunshine, rain, and bird twitters bring him to mind for Inge. He is dappled in light and active, while Werner (ironically younger and more handsome) is mostly seen bounded in shadowed spaces.

Both of Inge’s relationships are exceptional and rare in a film. The settled husband and wife partnership is depicted through their comfortable domesticity, from the kitchen to the bath to bedroom, but, unsettlingly, it’s only viewed after that opening illicit tryst. Even noteworthy cinematic recognitions of senior love—Richard Eyre‘s Iris, Sarah Polley’s Away from Her, and Paul Cox’s Innocence—relied on flashbacks to younger selves to indicate a couple’s long-term commitment.

So this makes Inge’s affair even more intriguing and volatile, and her betrayal even more a testament to the inexplicable power of love at any age—she is no beautiful Diane Lane being Unfaithful with hunky young Olivier Martinez. These are wrinkled, flabby bodies that get explicitly excited. Movies are usually comfortable with much older men only when they are seduced by younger women, or there’s Harold and Maude as the quirky exception.

Though it is unfortunate that bachelor Karl is as much of a blank cipher as the usual love object in youthful romances, like (500) Days of Summer, Inge is both giddily head over heels in sensual love and wracked with mature, responsible guilt. With a passionate performance, Ursula Werner sympathetically makes the audience feel the suspense of Inge’s wrenching choice, such that whatever she decides it will be the action of a real woman. Nora Lee Mandel
August 14, 2009