The idea of making a film about sexual desires of seniors is brilliant. Such a film was overdue. But Andreas Dresen, the 46-year-old director of Cloud 9 constructed a film about his own desires rather than exploring how seniors cope with society’s predilection to see them as sexless creatures. Dresen’s drama is not about the psychological challenges of growing old: losing your partner, falling in love again, wanting physical intimacy with someone who perhaps no longer cares for it. Dresen wants to demonstrate how we can be spooked by breaking many taboos of contemporary sensibilities. Hollywood staffs sex scenes with young women; he opens the film with a long sex scene with a woman in her late sixties and a seventy-six year old man. Even more shockingly, he gives the lead female character Inge (very well-played by Ursula Werner) the psychology of a sixteen-year-old girl who is naive, emotional, reckless, and irrational.

I am not sure whether this was intended or not, but Dresen devalues women by turning Inge into a teenage romantic fool while portraying her new lover Karl (Horst Westphal) and her retired husband, Werner, (Horst Rehberg) as mature, authentic, and reasonable people.  I have observed women and men getting older. Dresen’s film is not about their romantic and sexual development but about people in a midlife crisis who want to be young again.  Despite all these misgivings, the film is worth seeing even though I had to turn the DVD player off twice and spread the film out across three evenings.