Lulu und Jimi (aka Lulu and Jimi) is the newest movie by German film maker Oskar Roehler, who’s probably most famous for the adaptation of Houellebecq‘s Atomised. It’s a tribute to/remake of David Lynch‘s Wild at Heart, but set in Germany of the late 1950s.

Plot:
Lulu (Jennifer Decker) is the daughter of a bankrupt upper class family. Her mother (Katrin Saß) wants her to marry the slightly ridiculous Ernst (Bastian Pastewka), who doesn’t have much charm but a lot of money. But Lulu falls in love with Jimi (Ray Fearon), who not only doesn’t have any money, but has criminal tendencies and is black. As soon as Mummy Dearest finds out, she tries everything to get Lulu to marry Ernst. Including sending the chauffeur (Udo Kier), a psychotic doctor (Hans-Michael Rehberg) and a killer (Ulrich Thomsen) after the pair on the run.

This film might sound like a light RomCom, but trust me, it’s not. In fact, it is absolutely bonkers. [But that’s what you get when you take David Lynch as your idol and inspiration.] It is funny, yes, but it also has some pretty gruesome scenes. Not a family movie.

[SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS]

To comment on the script or the story would be kind of futile: It doesn’t make much sense, but then it’s not supposed to do. Lulu and Jimi fall in love, run a way, have a couple of non sequitur encounters with strangers, Jimi gets shot and put on a ship to America (because that’s what you do when you find somebody bleeding on the street: You make sure that they don’t miss their ship), Lulu returns home, gets Jimi’s child and months later he returns and everything’s happy.

It must have been hard to act in this movie – all the characters are caricatures of themselves. The evil drunk mother, the naive young Pollyanna, the chauffeur who has an affair with his employer etc etc. It’s definitely admirable that they could act at all with these prerequisites. That said, the result was only mediocre (with the exception of Katrin Saß and Udo Kier).

I have to say that the movie left me more bewildered than entertained. It did get some chuckles from me, but mostly I sat there wondering. Probably because I expected something entirely different. In Austria, it’s marketed as a funny little RomCom, kind of like Hairspray, but without the singing. What you get is much more complicated than that – and definitely more confusing. Plus, there actually is some singing.

Considering my expectations, I was also surprised by the violence. The psychotic doctor gets hired by the evil mum to scare the shit out of Lulu, then drug her and finally hypnotise her to give herself an abortion in case she got pregnant. And as Lulu does get pregnant, we see her boiling a knitting needle and starting to put it up her pussy [thankfully it stops there]. I could have really done without that. Then there was an almost rape, some shootings, some fights.

The soundtrack was really nice, full with 50s rock songs. [And let’s be honest: musically, the 50s and 60s were absofuckinglutely great.]

In case you hadn’t noticed, I still can’t make much sense of the film or how I actually liked it. But I guess my final verdict is that I didn’t find it interesting enough to see if a second view makes me understand it [if there is anything more to understand].