Don't Cheat, Darling! (Joachim Hasler, 1973)

 

I don’t know how many musicals came out of 1970’s East Germany, but Joachim Hasler’s Don’t Cheat, Darling! confirms that the total is more than zero. There are even fleeting moments, as dozens of brightly-dressed performers sing and dance in the picturesque, cobbled-street town of “Sonnenthal,” in which Jacques Demy’s sublime The Young Girls of Rochefort comes to mind, although Hasler can’t approach the choreographic finesse and cinematic grace of Demy’s film, and the songs (lots of strenuous odes to collective happiness) mostly evoke Eurovision (or on occasion perhaps, Man of La Mancha) more than Michel Legrand. Don't Cheat, Darling! is hardly a biting critique of the governing regime, but the narrative is explicitly premised on an infrastructure of extensive central planning and intervention and constant resource constraints, albeit that the film’s characters treat this mainly with good-natured exasperation, or as a challenge to be creatively overcome. The main medium of that is soccer; the accomplished Dr. Barbara Schwalbe arrives to take up a new administrative post, finding that the bus she arrived on and the apartment that should have accompanied the job are both being commandeered for the benefit of the local team. By the end of the film, just about every special interest group in town claims to have formed its own competing and equally entitled squad, and things end on a general note of renewal and optimism, although some of the narrative’s cumbersomely-articulated details escaped me. In common with the more drably crowd-pleasing British cinema of the period, the film suggests that just about every character has sex more or less constantly on their minds, given the lack of anything else to think about (excepting the character preoccupied with his pet rabbits, which might just be a variation on the same thing). although matters remain highly decorous - a late suggestion that two characters actually spent the night together comes as a mild shock!