Häppchenweise
Director: Maike Brochhaus
Seen on: 30.5.2015

Plot:
Franzi, Linus, Jenz, Till, Simon and Alice agreed on participating in Maike Brochhaus’ cinematic experiment: they will spend an evening together, filmed at all times, playing spin the bottle, talking frankly about sex and romance and see where things will lead them.

Häppchenweise is Brochhaus first take on post-pornographic film [she’s currently working on her second one]: a film that features explicit sex, but mostly a film that shows in how many different ways people can connect with each other outside of just inserting one person’s body parts into another person’s. The results might be tamer than most straight-up porn, but it’s also much sweeter.

Häppchenweise was an interesting and rather sexy film. All of the participants knew, of course, that the ultimate goal was to shoot a kind of porn film, so the sexual tensions was already palpable at the start. And since the audience was also in the same situation, it translated easily from the screen to yourself. While the people in the film slowly felt around (no pun intended) for their own limits, curiosity of both participants and audience gave slowly way to actual excitement.

But more exciting than the actual physical events of the film was to hear those people talk. It’s not often that you get six adults in a room, talking without shame or pretense (at least that’s what it felt like) about sex, love, relationships, personal preferences and experiences. Those are interesting topics that can do with a lot more publicity – and it was just interesting to listen to them.

Since the people in the film were amateurs and the setting pretty much a documentary, it makes comparisons with “conventional” porn films a little difficult. But what we got here and what we usually don’t get there, is that we had actual relatable human beings, who had to first establish some kind of relationship with each other – emotionality included – before things got a little more intense and putting the sex itself under a different light. “Just sex” is not necessarily a bad thing, but since almost the entire porn industry seems to rely on “just sex, no emotions”, it made for a very nice change.

Häppchenweise is a first attempt – and I’m looking forward to see Brochhaus’ next project: a feature film, a comedy with sex. Maybe they’ll even manage to include some more diverse body types in that one – that would be awesome. In any case, I’ll be watching.

Summarizing: Interesting film about sex and related things, with a little porn on the side.