As the British Film Institute Flare Festival heads into its final few days it’s nice to discover one of those quirky sub genres that makes these events special. Ladies, Gentlemen and Everybody let me introduce a new favourite, the Jolly Germanic Lesbian Romcom. It’s not often we get to put those three words together in a sentence that doesn’t include ‘Never have I ever’
Marie Theres known as Resi (Caroline Peters) is a German doctor living and working in Austria with her wealthy husband Alexander (Heikko Deutschmann). It is their anniversary dinner with friends and he has just come back from his first tree hugging men’s retreat. While there not only has Alexander rediscovered himself but he has also discovered he no longer wishes to be married to Resi. Alexander announces it to Resi and all her friends over the schnitzel. In a devastated drunken delirium Resi staggers towards home on her own but decides to stop off at a bar she has never noticed before – the Pussycat Club. There she recognizes Fa (Proschat Madani) who had almost ran her over in her van the morning prior. Fa is beautiful, studly and charismatic. An Iranian immigrant who is a carpenter by day, with a coterie of married female customers who can’t get enough of her handyperson skills, and an open mic night slam poetry rapper in the evening.
Resi is so drunk she isn’t entirely sure if anything happened between her and Fa when she accidentally bumps into her at the hospital the next day. Fa is with her sick mother, an escapee from the Shah of Iran’s brutal regime. Fa has never told her mother that she is a lesbian.
And so Resi and Fa’s meet-cute develops into a romance. Resi wants to hide their relationship from her children and Fa wants to hide it from her elderly mother. The second-act problem involves a lot of literal and metaphorical hiding in closets.
While the film touches on the plight of women and gay people in Iran and the struggles of immigrants in the West it is not heavy handed. Written and directed by Kat Rohrer it stays on a mission to charm and delight. Proschat Madani plays Fa as an irresistible force of nature while Caroline Peters makes Resi’s flowering from icy edelweiss to passionate peony endearing. With some fun minor characters to round out the story the movie delivers against all the expectations for the broader romcom genre. But What A Feeling has its own little twists and perspectives, including some wry air time for the rapidly evaporating open mic dyke bars. It’s great for the Jolly Germanic Lesbian Romcom to have a moment of its own.
