Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Groupies bleiben nicht zum Frühstück" or "Single by Contract" is a German 100-minute movie from 2010, so it's already over 5 years old. The two female script writers (Henn and Schmidbauer, they worked together on several occasions and this was their first full feature film) are not known to me really, but director Marc Rothemund is certainly known in Germany. He worked on the Oscar-nominated "Sophie Scholl" and on other fairly famous films like "Harte Jungs". But this film here is definitely not his greatest achievement. It is the story of a young woman who returns from having spent one year abroad and she does not know about a fairly famous band in Germany. She falls in love with the lead singer and everybody knows who he is except our main character of course. The situations and explanations where she closely misses the signs and events when we find out how famous he is are really embarrassing sometimes and it starts right away with the airplane and the television show in there while the main character is sleeping.She is played by actress Anna Fischer and this is one of her most known works for sure, probably the one that is most known which has her play the main character. Sadly, her performance here is quirky, but really forgettable in terms of range. Her male co-lead Kostja Ullmann is usually a pretty weak actor, but here he is slightly better than in his other projects. Does not mean he is good though. The acting in this film is among the biggest weaknesses. Another weakness is the script. There are occasional moments that work well, basically all that have to do with the scenario of a girl falling in love with a big star, or also towards the end the fading popularity in this short-lived (when it comes to stardom) world. We see the main character's sister replace her old posters with new ones. But every time the film goes into detail, it all gets very messy. The dramatic events about arguments, people betraying each other as they fall for somebody else's crush never work at all and it just does not feel very authentic. The comedy is probably even worse on most occasions. This has to do on the one hand with the way it is written, on the other hand with the abysmal line delivery by some of the characters. One example would be towards the end one girl speaking about the open mouth of another girl from her class. That scene was really bad. Anyway, with a fairly absurd main plot like this one, you have to bring in lots of authenticity and realism on other occasions. This film does not. It goes for cheesy romance, predictable story-lines and sub-par (almost non-existing) character development. It is quite a failure overall and there are moments in this film that do not even deserve 4 stars out of 10. Overall, the script and acting sure needed better approaches. I don't recommend the watch. Thumbs-down.