The Gamblers

Jojo (Peter Lohmeyer), an inept gambler, falls in love with his attractive cousin Kathrin (Anica Dobra), a boarding school student. What begins as a light-hearted romance quickly turns into a story of responsibility, escape, and loss when their aunt dies, leaving Kathrin an inheritance of €20,000 and Jojo a dog. Jojo, just as addicted to gambling as his best friend Tom, loses the money but manages to win it back with Kathrin’s help. When the police get involved, the couple flees to southern France, where Kathrin becomes pregnant by Jojo... Dominik Graf’s film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, blends elements of comedy, melodrama, thriller, and road movie, playing skillfully with cinematic conventions. Graf, founding member of the German Film Academy and award-winning director of films like Beloved Sisters and The Invincibles, directs with a playfulness rarely seen in German cinema. The dialogues of the film’s vibrant characters are sharp, while the narrative deliberately balances between lightness and existential depth. “A comparison with the Nouvelle Vague was often drawn in contemporary reviews; and indeed, the characters’ tendency to turn their lives into a film—doubtful and passionate at once—clearly resembles the trio in Godard’s Bande à part (1964). Yet the film is not derivative, and one needn’t know its possible influences to marvel at how it repeatedly creates moments of magic and authenticity from its deliberate artificiality. This is due not only to the chemistry between Dobra (playful and impulsive) and Lohmeyer (dry and laconic), but above all to Graf’s unique eye for locations. Somehow, the director manages to make Munich and the Côte d’Azur appear both as tangible real places and as dreamlike sets built especially for the film.” (Maurice Lahde, critic.de)