More than just the two of us

I have a reasonable command of German, so I'm always interested to find more comment in German. So when came across a movie that was relatively recent by my standards, You & I, I still decided to watch it.

Jonas is a photographer who lives in Berlin and has a girlfriend whom we never see, although we hear her on Jonas' answering machine as Jonas basically blows her off. Jonas is basically planning on taking a small working vacation out to the Uckermark, a sparsely populated (at last by German standards) district northeast of Berlin and full of lakes and bucolic landscapes. Jonas spent some time in London, living there for a year with a Brit named Philip, and Jonas has invited Philip to come visit him and spend some time together on vacation, including an old manor house Jonas' uncle owns.

Philip is gay, and definitely not shy about it. You wonder if he's the sort of person who would take part in a pride march fairly undressed considering how comfortable he is letting Jonas take candid nude photos of him (think coming out of the water from skinny dipping and the like, not posed in the studio). It's to the point that you might find yourself wondering whether Jonas is really gay but in the closet, or maybe bi-curious, and that tension is part of what makes the movie tick.

And then, to make things more tense, the two pick up a Polish hitch-hiker named Boris. He seems really repressed at first, and is very uncomfortable with Philip's openness and lack of body issues. But when he finds that Philip and Jonas had spent a year together in London, he asks whether the two of them are a gay couple, which is met with laughter. It's enough for Boris to open up, and we find that he may be the one that's been in the closet all this time.

To be honest, there's not all that much going on in You & I, but for me, that's one of the things that made the movie more enjoyable. These feel a lot more like real people than the cardboard cutouts we get when people want "representation", not fitting any stereotypes. The story, what little of it there is since in some ways this is closer to a slice of life movie, intelligently asks the viewer to fill in the blanks. And the resolution of the story isn't necessarily what you'd expect.

So if you can find You & I -- I came across it on one of the streaming platforms although I don't recall right now which one -- definitely give it a watch.