So an old German woman walks into a bar to get out of the rain, right, and it turns out it’s a bar frequented by Arabic-speaking guest workers. She sits alone, drinking a cola, until the bartender dares one of the men to ask her to dance. He does; she does. They make a connection with each other, despite their age and ethnic difference, and before you know it, he’s walked her back to her place, been invited in, and spent the night. And really super-quickly after that (it’s not clear to me if it’s supposed to be super-hasty, or if there’s supposed to be some time passing between scenes and it’s just regular hasty), they’re married.

Which brings us to the after-school special portion of our program, wherein we encounter cartoon racism. The old lady introduces her (adult) children to her new husband; they’re angry because of how he’s a foreigner, and one of them kicks her TV screen in. The other old women in her building are all like “hey, because of your husband, the stairwell is all dirty, because he’s a foreigner, see, so you need to clean it up.” The old women she works with are all like “omg you have a foreigner for a husband, we’re not even going to talk to you anymore.” Even the corner grocer is all like “you’re not welcome in my store anymore, you foreigner-loving woman.”

I don’t know, this might just be an accurate picture of what Germany in the ’70s was like, but it’s really over-the-top, and it’s hard to take too much away from it other than that cartoon racism is bad, which I was going to say isn’t really a shocking or controversial statement in 2018, but then I remembered which 2018 we’re living in.

But at a certain point, this stuff starts drying up — the kids come to terms with their mom’s new husband (coincidentally while asking her to babysit the grandkids); the biddies in the building get okay with this foreigner (coincidentally, after he helps move some heavy things in the cellar for them); one of the work ladies is fired, and the others stop excluding her; and even the corner grocer decides that he doesn’t want to lose her business, as she goes to the supermarket now.

And this is where the movie gets more subtle and interesting, as tension builds between the old German woman and the younger Moroccan man. She is so pleased that her friends are accepting her again, that when she has them over and they’re talking about her husband as an exotic pet, she doesn’t stop the conversation (and even encourages them to feel his muscles). Later, he wants couscous, she says she can’t make it and he ought to quit eating foreign foods anyway, so he goes off to the apartment of a woman from that bar, who makes him couscous plus ps also they have sex. When the old woman goes to see him at work, his work buddies all laugh at his “grandma” coming to visit, and he joins in. Etc. And basically this part of the movie is about the difficulty of a relationship not because it’s beset by obviously awful forces, but because what people want and are able to offer might not match up enough.

But really, the movie never goes that deep. It feels like a fundamentally slight film despite the big themes it touches on (the director might have agreed, as he made it in 15 days as a palate cleanser between “bigger” movies).