dirtylaundri’s review published on Letterboxd:
A film one would very much like to love: a one-off affair made by outsiders who seemingly came from nowhere and went into nowhere (turns out: from and into the periphery of the art world), hoping to make their big entrance not by way of working within proven formulas or attaching themselves to a hip agenda... but by self-confidently shooting for the grandest scale possible, an operatic and rather straight-forward pop melodrama of high fashion - starring Wolfgang Joop, while taking cues from Douglas Sirk and namedropping Visconti, Verdi, da Vinci...
Yet, well, not everything hidden is a gem in the end. It's not a complete trainwreck if only because it is, for the most part, competently made, and refrains from cheap irony (while failing to achieve the higher, Sirkian one). One thing it lacks is any kind of forward moving drive. Everything feels static even in dramatic scenes, and it does not take long to realize that the script confuses soap opera mechanics with the grandezza of true melodrama. Meaning the drama on screen keeps being stuck in the limited thrills of the present, into reaching out throughout time and space, becoming cinematic.
Joop's quite enthusiastic non-acting holds some appeal for a while (at times, you expect his facial features to completely disintegrate every moment now, but no, he holds steady until the very end), in the end, though, he just has not enough to do here, and this is even more true for Violetta Sanchez. Christoph Eichhorn as Joop's bitchy assistant/friend/rival/not-quite-love-interest probably fares much better in quite a few lively scenes, and I guess turning the whole thing into a high fashio farce generally would have been the way to go, here.
Given all that, I would still very much like to know how this looks on 35mm.