Summer in Berlin By James Bowman

"'Posters were being put up in cities and towns across Germany yesterday,' reported the Times of London the other week, 'urging women to make use of the Baby-Klappe, with the slogan 'Before babies land in the rubbish bin...'' The Baby-Klappe is a hatch installed in German hospitals to allow women to deposit unwanted babies anonymously. It is hoped that it will halt a spate of at least 23 child murders so far this year. Typical is Susanne H. from Baiersdorf in Bavaria who strangled her newborn baby daughter and put the body in her freezer because, she said, her boyfriend 'threatened to throw me out if I concealed another pregnancy from him.' German fertility rates, like those across Europe, suggest that there is also a larger, cultural sense in which children are not wanted there.

Fortuitously, along comes Andreas Dresen's Summer in Berlin (Sommer vorm Balkon) to give us some insight into the state of the sexual culture where people seem to have lost the will to reproduce. Not, I hasten to add, that that is the film's purpose. It's really a female buddy picture before it is anything else, in which the friendship between Nike (Nadja Uhl) and Katrin (Inka Friedrich) is threatened when they compete for the attentions of Ronald (Andreas Schmidt). But the overwhelming sense of this movie is of hopelessness and limited options. Katrin is nearing 40, the divorced mother of 12-year-old Max (Vincent Redetzki), and she can't find a job. The film opens with a sadly comic look at the fierce competition and criticism she faces at the interview for even such lowly employment as a department store window-dresser. Her real passion is painting, but she can't sell any of that work either."

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