Black Sheep Oliver Rihs Germany 2006
Black Sheep opens with a fairly posh looking couple having dinner in a plush Berlin hotel restaurant. Suddenly the man starts to choke on his food for an inordinate amount of time before sprawling all over the restaurant and the other diners, spewing out projectiles of food in his convulsions. When he’s finally revived the hotel manager gives him a free suite in compensation. Flat on his back on the bed the man slyly suggests to his partner that they can have sex if she goes on top, to begin with. It’s all been a con. There follows a magnificent bout of preposterously athletic sex that could put The Tall Guy to shame.
Reset your outrage meter with Black Sheep, as the film trawls around Berlin in the company of various slackers, wandering the streets and generally shooting the breeze. Boris the hotel con artist returns to his humble home, two political idealists run errands for a magazine, a couple argue, two very suburban Satanists go about their business and a bunch of young Turkish teens prowl around town for sex.
With lots of shocking bodily humour it’s often hilarious as posh people choke in restaurants or as pretentious affluent West Germans get vomited upon on tourist boats. It’s basically a loose selection of scenes and scenarios cobbled together, shot in black and white, not dissimilar to the recent trend in comedy television shows to give their creations a sense of community. Occasionally jump cuts are used to get from scene to scene but mainly this film relies on sheer vibrancy to lurch between the loose plot threads. The more sophisticated jokes briefly poke fun at Osties (rich West Germans) or misguided young political activists but the mainstay is a puerile sense of humour. Visually the other trick Black Sheep uses are the occasional flashes of faint colour along the lines of the girl in the red coat in Schindler's List - the paperclip Boris uses to fool a hotel into thinking that his food was spiked, an old man’s braces, drinks etc.
Nothing particularly binds the film together apart from the sense of humour and the speech used at the beginning and end of one of the plot-lines - about the best moments in one’s life flashing before one’s eyes at the end. As one might expect it’s loosely applicable to the film. All the characters are pariahs, black sheep even, in some sense or another having their moments throughout the film.
If you can handle the loose structure and humour there’s a lot to like here. Failing that there’s always the ending. Although I can’t reveal it here the film is worth watching for two shocking moments near the end. One concerns the suburban Satanists carrying out an arcane rite to bring them fame and riches. The other ends the film after a party, with the Turkish guys, still horny. It amounts to ‘tomorrow is another day’ tailored specifically for the teen sex comedy crowd.
