This debut feature from German filmmaker Jules Herrmann is rather a puzzling mixture of styles and techniques that ensure that this is no ordinary thriller. The story starts with the unannounced arrival of Antik Liebmann (Godehard Giese) a forty-something school teacher who turns up to spend the summer in a rented apartment in a small French town. His immediate neighbor is Geneviève (Adeline Moreau) an attractive red-headed single mother who has a 10 year child, and they are lodging with a elderly couple in the man in building adjacent to Liebmann’s new home.
Even with his poor grasp of the French language, it’s clear to Liebmann that Geneviève is hitting on him, but it isn’t until he is at his new job at a Thrift Market and he meets Sébastian (Fabien Ara) that we realize that Liebmann hasn’t responded to her advance because he prefers men. He is a very reserved and quiet type and everyone fails to extract from him where he came from, and in fact why he is there. He has a severe case of insomnia and when he does manage to sleep he is obviously deeply disturbed about something that we assume to do with the fact that he had been startled by gunfire in the nearby forest the same day that a dead body was later discovered there.
Then one day his sister Ines (Bettina Grahs) arrives out of the blue from Germany and as she confronts her brother for leaving without even saying goodbye, we finally learn what Liebmann had been running away from. Actually with the mystery mainly solved, Hermann adds a different type of confusion with his very conceptual finale which left a lot to be desired. He had already experimented with aspects like coloring the films negative from monochrome to blood red, and turning a baking a cake scene into a camp magical party piece , which was all nicely eccentric.
What saves the piece is the very understated but extremely touching relationship that blooms between Liebmann and young Sébastian, despite the older man playing hot and cold at the beginning. He may not want to talk about much, and especially his past, but in one romantic moment he explains to the Frenchman that ‘lieb’ stands for ‘amour’ and mann for ‘homme’ . And that was enough for the young man to get hooked and want to live happily ever after,
