Love's Confusion (Slatan Dudow, 1959)

 

The basic plot of Love’s Confusion, the last film completed by Slatan Dudow, sounds as frothy as that of any Hollywood romcom: art student Sonja is dating medical student Dieter, who gets distracted by the less complex Siegi, whose boxer boyfriend Edy then sets his sights on Sonja, the two reconfigured couples eventually heading toward marriage despite the obvious intellectual and temperamental incompatibilities. Dudow oversees these events with a sustained lack of sentimentality or romantic exuberance; Sonja is particularly self-contained and enigmatic, seeming to regard her boyfriend’s interest in another woman as something of a social experiment (even as she acknowledges that the distraction is eroding the quality of her art). For an East German film of its period, there’s little ideological or moral content (only a few brief scenes of industrial production!): the characters seem largely self-defined (and not overly subject to economic constraints), and the film has a rather startling vein of titillation including a few bare backsides and, in an extended “carnival” sequence, intimations of widespread sexually liberated goings-on. That sequence is a modest tour de force, with Dieter wandering through areas labeled for purgatory and hell and love and so forth, among hundreds of thronging costumed extras, and a sense of burgeoning possibility which recurs throughout the movie – even in the recurring scenes of Dieter’s class attendance, the lecturers often seem less to be imparting hard knowledge than to be drifting into philosophy. This culminates in a finale when matters correct themselves on the way to the altar, not an unfamiliar genre device, but one again executed here in remarkably low-key, matter-of-fact manner. Overall, the film is hardly as radical and memorable as Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe, but then not many are; on its own terms it’s often quietly surprising, with a palpable sense of pushing against imposed standards and boundaries.