Amateur actors playing themselves based on a screenplay and foundation from their own experience: EASY LOVE by director Tamer Jandali is an experiment in cinematic authenticity. On top of that, it‘s about the most intimate thing a person can show: love and sex, daily life and problems. The protagonists are lesbian and straight, monogamous and out and about, but all of them are sexually interested people who are searching for ways to live out their sexuality and make connections. Lenny moves into her new girlfriend‘s one room apartment; Sören lives in luxurious homelessness at his sexual partners‘ place. Stella wants to have an open relationship. Sophia lives back in with her old school feminist mother and starts working as a sex worker. The film jumps from one character to the next in a fleet-footed way and brings them together in impressive montages. Intense sex scenes have intimate atmospheres. The dialogues seem true to life, each character has their own kind of intensity. They are hipsters and hippies, self-righteous and esoteric, respectful and loving, take drugs, dance outside with glitter on the face, and are sometimes likable and sometimes annyoing – they‘re people. Sometimes you have to be careful not to get cynical about them as they search for meaning and love, “with their relationships and their fucking and their hedonistic lifestyle,“ as Sophia formulates it herself. But other times you feel very close to them. Female desire and self-determination play an important role in all the plots, but male sexuality is viewed from interesting perspectives as well. Answers to the complex problems of existence and coexistence are not offered. EASY LOVE just wants to show us how it all feels.

Eva Szulkowski

Translation: Elinor Lewy