3

3, a 2011 film by Tom Tykwer, is a smart, well-made film, but somehow I felt a little let down by it. This is most likely my own fault, because I was beset by prejudices--of how the Germans can't do comedy, which made me think of that Mike Myers character from Saturday Night Live, Dieter. I'm sure this movie would have made his nipples hard.

I say this because the plot of 3 is really an old one that has been in farce for centuries, although it has been updated to the polymorphously perverse modern age. Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper) have been in a long-term relationship that has started to curdle. They both meet, independently, a biologist, Adam (Devid Stiesow), who is bisexual. He then has sexual affairs with both of them, without knowing that they are a couple. If this were a French farce there'd be lots of slamming doors. In fact, there is one scene that comes close to that, when Simon and Hanna both see Adam at a museum, and both want to avoid him. The scene is comic in nature, but Tykwer gives is a kind of typical German sangfroid.

It's unfair to discuss this film for what it is not, though. It is a very good film, though a bit bloodless. Tykwer's overall theme seems to be the circle of life itself. It begins with a death--Simon's mother, and ends with new life--both in Hanna's womb and in the possibility of a different kind of relationship, one that is still not accepted in any society that I know of. It is important that Tykwer's story of a love triangle involves two men and one woman; two make it two women and one man is the stuff of adolescent fantasy, and one that is accepted in societies that permit polygamy.

Tykwer layers the film with a lot of stuff. The occupations of the principles, for instance, are fraught with meaning. Adam is a biologist working with stem cells. He has to appear before a board of ethics (presumably because stem cells involve cells from aborted babies, but I wasn't quite sure about this). Hanna, some kind of public intellectual, is on the board. Simon is an "art engineer," which would seem to be an oxymoron. His company takes the ideas of an artist and builds them, which makes it questionable if it is really the artist's work.

But 3 is more about life and death. Simon has a brush with testicular cancer, and loses one in the process. He had assumed he was infertile, as he and Hanna had never had children even without using contraception, but then he meets a nurse who was an old lover who tells him she aborted his baby. Simon has dreams about his mother's funeral, where he is following a cortege and spits out his teeth. Losing teeth is a common meme in dreams, symbolizing death and decay. Yes, this is a very German film.

I admired 3 as a work of art, but I wasn't in love with it. It has a Teutonic aloofness, never inviting the viewer to empathize with the characters. Instead, they are more like laboratory specimens, the cells that Adam looks at in a Petri dish. There is also a lot of sex in this film, something I never complain about, but here it seems gratuitous, like porn for intellectuals.