Manuela Dahm

Three pretty schoolgirls of marriageable age giggle and cackle while lying naked in bed as they read from the erotic notes of one of them, which are compiled in a notebook called "My intimate diary". One day, the author of these late-pubescent outpourings, Monika Hannemann, daughter of a town councillor, leaves her erotic fantasies in the classroom, whereupon these lines fall into the hands of the slippery teacher Miss Stubentreu. She reads them and learns from the lines that Monika must have become a village mattress and slept with half the men in Bumburg. Soon the erotic content is making the rounds, becoming the talk of the small town, and the conjectures and insinuations about who had or could have had what with whom in Bumburg run rampant. Even a reporter named Waltraut Henze, who has few scruples, arrives because she senses a sensational story behind the scribblings.

On a rainy vacation day in a hotel room in Yugoslavia, a 40-year-old father and his adolescent daughter are bored. In the free-flowing surroundings, the dreams he once had in his youth come back to life in him. The game becomes almost serious. Only the presence of his daughter makes him realize that there is no way to start a new life without acting irresponsibly towards his child. And so he is left with a quiet resignation and the hope that his daughter will do better one day.

The film follows William, thirty-ish, out of work and looking for a new life after apparently having been thrown out of his previous one. He meets up with Noelle, who seems intrigued by his restlessness - until her economist boyfriend shows up. Yet plot details do little to convey the power of the film, which lay in its capturing the anarchic texture of William's life - a life whose lack of direction was read as a rebuke of the Swiss myth of orderliness and self-satisfaction. With his roots in documentary, Soutter excelled at creating a loose, vibrant cinema, full of quick zooms and dynamic hand-held shots, with dialogue that often alternated between outright quotations and stylized interviews.