More or Less

• 1999
• 0 Hrs 18 Mins
• Other

She is a phone operator, he is a cab driver. In the evening they meet again in their shared apartment to read comics and have sex. He watches football on TV, she has a bath. Indecisively they try out other possibilities, gestures, stylings. The preparations for breakfast are a routine of well-coordinated motions. In just 18 minutes the film takes a lot of time to show the course of events in their duration and repetition. Everything is always the same--yet different. This is a film one should see at least twice in a row: then the expectation of a narrative development and/or a point won't even arise and one can concentrate on the subtle details that sketch and deconstruct a 'good' relationship (and the 'relationship film'). The film doesn't operate towards the exterior like Speak Easy, rather it implodes in small, exact gestures and escapes. The largest part of love life is set neither in the 'seventh heaven' nor in a 'relationship hell', but rather in the extensive in-between where conventional narrative cinema rarely strays. The young couple, whose love life Mirjam Unger sketches accurately in More or Less, shares its most tender moments while reading comics together in bed. And there is no need to have a big fight to torture each other; the everyday heedlessness and rejections are enough. In between there are a few irrelevant little escapades: indecisive approaches in other people's bedrooms or kisses that want to be forgotten the next day.