On Screen

Absurdistan, a soft-edged German satire about a
sleepy-yet-zany Central European town that runs out of water, is
not an adaptation of the harder-edged satirical novel of the
same name by Gary Shteyngart. (Too bad. Shteyngart’s
Absurdistan, with its obese Russian émigré
narrator and his botched circumcision and bungling travels in an oil
dictatorship, is a gallows-humor action movie just waiting to be
made.)

This Absurdistan is a light, sweet fairy tale, basically a
children’s movie, about sex and how much people enjoy having it.
(Très European, no?) Young and old, chubby and svelte, furry and
smooth, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker—everybody
in the little unnamed town likes to make sweet, loud love, every night
at sundown. But the men are too lazy to fix the broken water pipes and
the town is getting stinky and thirsty, so the women go on a Lysistrata
sex strike. The men, proud and patriarchal, collectively declare:
You’re not the boss of me. The women paint a line down the
center of town, the genders are divided, and it’s all old-timey battle
of the sexes until the end, when a virgin saves the day. (Because he
doesn’t want to die a virgin.)

Absurdistan pitches its tent in Euro-whimsy territory, just
outside the capital city of Amélie: Rube Goldberg
contraptions, animal humor (some involving donkeys), sad-sack men with
baggy faces, not much dialogue, a happy hooker, true love conquering
all. The young virgins are adorable: Max Mauff, with his cowlick and
wide-eyed guilelessness, is like a young European clown. And Kristyna
Malérová, a young Czech beauty, has a heartbreakingly
open and sincere expression. One knows, from the first scene, that they
live in that charmed corner of movieland where nothing horrible ever
happens, where all conflict is born of well-intentioned
misunderstanding, where people live happily ever after.