Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Nackt" or "Naked" is an almost 15-year-old film by Doris Dörrie, one of Germany's most influential female filmmakers. It tells us the stories of 6 people (3 couple) that are having dinner together and play a most awkward game in order to prove how good the males know the females. All 6z actors are still known here in Germany, some more and some less. Unfortunately, I never really cared for any of the characters in here or how (un)happy they were. The one exception is perhaps Alexandra Maria Lara who gave a good performance in my opinion and that is also why I thought her and Vogel were the most interesting of the bunch. Makatsch and Fürmann are two actors I consider pretty overrated, so i am not too surprised that they were the two where I really couldn't care less. Of course, their way of changing the game to make money and stir up trouble was not in their favor at all. And it was not in the filmmaker's either as it really felt as if Dörrie was realizing around the 60-minute mark that this was just a boring result, so she (ab)used the character to bring in some tension. There was almost never a sequence or dialogue that felt really authentic to me. It all felt written and fake with very few exceptions. This film's IMDb rating is not very high, but still too high, but the ones who really got it wrong were the German Film Awards back then who really considered this very pretentious and mediocre work one of the best achievements of 2002. It is not. Do not watch. I think with a better adaptation this may actually kinda work as a theatre stage play, but as a film (at least in the version we have here) it does not. Thumbs down.
