"Die
Bettwurst" (
Die=
German female article
Bettwurst=hard,
sausage-like
pillow) also called "
Kieler Bettwurst" (1970)
Rosa von Praunheims 5th film starring Dietmar Kracht as himself and Praunheim's aunt Luzi Kryn also as herself.
The plot is set in Northern
German city
Kiel where the strange couple meets for the first time:
He (Ditmar) grew up in poor enviroment in orphanages and later on in the red light districts of
Frankfurt where he got to know sleazy girls and tough guys. In oder to escape this envirment he moved to
Kiel and instantly moves in with Luzy, who shows him around the town and helps him to reintegrate into society. At some point they fall in love with each other and comes to a head in a heartbreakingly dilettant
love-scene. But then Luzy gets kidnapped by Ditmars former friends, the tough guys. Having found the perfect love and being deprived of it by ghosts of his dark past drives him to insanity and is shown in a scene quoted from
Macbeth. Ditmar kills one of the gangsters with a gun and rescues Luzy. As he realizes that he had killed a man, he flees with Luzy.
The whole
movie is a laugh: The plot is straight enough to guess the end after 2 minutes. The actors are dilettans, they loose their text, look into the camera and as they obivously improvise they do rarly react to what the other one says. Totally obscure scenes are streched to length and you sometimes think all participants must have been mentally ill.
Nevertheless, after a few times viewing you either get also mentally ill or get used to the bizarre and start getting the underlying plot (boy meets girl, they fall in love with each other, he rescues her from a dangerous situation, they will always be in love) and see a lot of details that show the plan behind the work.
In
Kiel "Die Bettwurst" is a
cult-movie among
students.