Film rating: 3/5 (The Editor); 1.5/5 (John Surname)
Walkouts: 2/5
Pretentious clapping at credits: 0/5
BPM sighting: No

Love hurts - even when you’re over 60.

Sixty-something seamstress Inge is thrown into a torrid love affair after bringing a pair of pants she altered to their owner, the affable 76-year-old Karl. The problem is she’s still in love with her husband of 30 years, Werner, a man whose greatest hobby is listening to recordings of locomotives in the evenings.

With the unbridled passion of 20-year-olds, Inge and Karl’s explicit trysts cause a rift in Inge’s marriage, forcing her to choose between her life-long love and a new infatuation.

The Editor says: The opening scene of Cloud Nine was rather confronting. I mean, watching wrinkly 70-year-olds do the dirty in all its explicit glory is not exactly what I expect to see at 7pm in the evening just after dinner. Unfortunately, the film went all generic and cliched after that — it was a bog standard love affair storyline with old actors instead of young. If the projectionist had stopped the film after twenty minutes and asked me to write the rest of the film’s plot I would’ve got it 95% correct. And the ending was terrible. Just terrible. So utterly cliched and predictable that I was a bit angry when the credits rolled.

It was probably more a two star film but I gave it an extra star because it did manage to get me thinking about the nature of love and lust in humans’ autumn years.

(*shudders*)

John Surname says: The Editor invited me out on a date to go and see a moving picture show, at the moving picture show festival. Being one for a pleasant night of debauchery, I put on my finest pair of trousers and joined him at The Forum to see a German film called Cloud 9.

The film opened with a graphic scene of a man and a woman “making babies”, which is fine, except he was 76 and she was well past 60. The cinema was filled with nervous giggles, except from The Editor, who was breathing very hard and concentrating enormously, and myself, for I am not that immature.

After the film ended, The Editor noted that if you’d been asked to guess the plot of the film after the first ten minutes you would have gotten it 95% right. There were no surprises. The film involved some pretty photography, masses of convulsing wrinkles, and not much else. There was little, to no, subtext, and many lingering images that did not end.

In the end the film had almost no resonance, which is why, as I type this, I can barely remember it.

One and a half stars, Margaret.