Review: ‘AEIOU - A Quick Alphabet Of Love’

It’s not your regular meet-cute. Anna Moth (Sophie Rois) an actress recognized by people in the street but apparently unable to get work — “everyone knows she’s mental,” says a fellow actor after she extracts herself from his grip during the recording of a clearly low-rent radio play — gets mugged in the street outside a smart bar by a young man. He takes her handbag while a spunky young woman who sees the whole incident chases after him and gets the bag back, minus the wallet. Anna, meanwhile, is recovering her composure inside the bar, diva-style.

“No more than a kid, really,” she says when describing the incident to Michel (Udo Kier), her landlord, benefactor, confidante and possibly number-one fan. What was he wearing? “A leather jacket. I could smell it.” Michel throws his head back, closes his eyes and sniffs theatrically. “The perfect combination,” he sighs. And there you have it all: the mix of romantic whimsy, camp and creepiness that permeates Nicolette Krebitz’s Berlin Film Festival competition title AEIOU – A Quick Alphabet Of Love.

When Anna visits her doctor — another huge fan, obvs — and he asks her to do speech training with a boy involved with a theater group for young offenders, you just know who is going to show up. Floppy bangs, odd glasses, the jacket. Anna recognizes him and is duly titillated, but it takes a visit to her apartment before he clicks. He is unnerved, though not as worried as he is by the fact her husband hanged himself in the apartment. As he tries to beat his ghost out of the hall closet, their earlier encounter fades into unimportance. There is so much more ahead that is so much wackier.

There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the young man’s speech that would merit medical intervention but, as a disembodied narrative voice will tell us, Adrian (Milan Herms) really suffers from a more comprehensive impediment: life is his problem. He is failing at junior high school and on his third foster family. Anna is offered good money to train him to speak more clearly, pressing his back to get him to breathe into his “A” sounds. The voiceover tells us Adrian never felt loved. Well, that’s about to change.

Do Anna and Adrian ever make it to E? Not that we see; they are busy going for romantically entwined walks in the park, having lovers’ tiffs and reunions. She cooks him soup. He steals her a fancy handbag. His petty thieving skills prove especially useful when they spontaneously take a trip to the Riviera, where he carries her naked through the streets from a midnight swim back to their cheap but charming hotel. “They can no longer resist each other,” says the narrator, in case we failed to pick up on that. “They both come, first Anna, then Adrian, the way it should be.”

Dubious? Certainly. Love and lust between older women and younger men is having a moment; Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck To You Leo Grande, also about a woman in her 60s (Emma Thompson) who hires a younger male sex worker, is also screening at the Berlinale, while some controversy has bubbled around the romantic friendship portrayed in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza.

With AEIOU, Krebitz steps right over the line, but by that stage we are so far into the realm of the nonsensical that it barely makes sense to wonder next morning at the legalities. Adrian is off to the patisserie to steal some breakfast; Anna smiles in her sleep, a happy woman at last. Amour fou has never looked more loopy.