Quartett im Bett

GER 1968
Director: Ulrich Schamoni
Cast: Andrea Rau, Ingo Insterburg, Jürgen Barz, Peter Ehlebracht, Karl Dall

92 Min. | DF | Deutsche Fassung

Tribute

Ulrich Schamoni’s alternative response to the Munich-based blockbuster
»Zur Sache Schätzchen«. Everything is a bit more loud, brash and rude.
Which is why the four anarcho-singers Insterburg & Co obviously run into
the Jacobs Sisters, the model of clean popular music. The bar-hopping and
bumming about of the four men around Ingo Insterburg are always contrasted
with scenes from the other Berlin: at city hall in Schöneberg, Tegel Airport,
Beate Uhse at Bahnhof Zoo, the border and a visit to the Springer skyscraper
contrast with episodes from Kreuzberg, anti-bourgeois attitudes, street cafés
and rundown apartments with a communal bathroom.
The probably nicest compliment came from the Catholic Filmdienst which
mostly attested the film »an embarrassing sequence of lame, purportedly
burlesque-like gags« and believed Insterburg & Co to be a »hanger-on of the
student movement.« Schamoni approaches the border between documentary
and fiction as close as ever before. The spirited performance by the Insterburgs, the grandiose musical interludes, the camera and the flittering editing
dissolve into a mélange of nouvelle vague and slapstick. In the middle the
beautiful Andrea Rau, whom this film made an icon of the sexual revolution.