Men

Love me, love my double standards, that's what Julius (Lauterbach), a power hungry packaging magnate and habitual seducer of secretaries, expects from his wife. He gets it too, until their 12th anniversary, when a love bite on her neck suggests that an equaliser is at work. At this early point in Doris Dörrie's concise and sharply observed satire, you might be forgiven for thinking that a feminist attack is under way. Not so. Julius, who hasn't come to own a Maserati simply by waiting for things to happen, takes leave of absence to strike back. Concealing his identity, he persuades his wife's lover (Ochsenknecht) to accept him, first as a lodger in his squalid bachelor apartment, then as a partner in his low-achieving hippy life. It's the start of an unpredictable friendship that puts both men's motivation under the microscope. The screenplay requires a certain suspension of disbelief - would a wife be so easily deceived by a gorilla suit? - but she turns the tables neatly so that each gets his just deserts. Hers not to stick in the knife, rather to entertain with insight and mirth.