I phone you

Ling (Jiang Yiyan) lives in the megacity of Chongqing, where she works a simple job as a flower girl. When she meets wealthy businessman Yu (Wu Da Wie), her life seems to change drastically. However, Yu lives in Berlin and contact is only possible via the iPhone he gave Ling. But one day, Ling gathers all her courage and uses her savings to travel to Berlin. However, it is not her lover who receives her there, but his bodyguard Marco (Florian Lukas). Marco is supposed to make sure that Ling flies back to China before his wife gets wind of the affair. But Ling is not so easily dissuaded, and so soon begins an odyssey through Berlin, where Ling is confronted with different cultures, social classes and lifestyles in the capital. And at the end of this journey is a destination that looks very different from what Ling had imagined when she arrived.

I phone you is reminiscent of films like John Landis' Headlong into the Night or Martin Scorsese's The Time After Midnight in terms of story structure. Director Dan Tang filmed the screenplay by Wolfgang Kohlhaase (Sommer vorm Balkon) with great attention to detail. Both the scenes in Chongqing and the journey through Berlin are staged with a pleasant lightness that is all too often missing from German films in particular. Ling's turbulent journey through Berlin is sometimes funny, sometimes a little sad. She meets a wide variety of people, from an extremely helpful student to a lovable Turkish taxi driver to a disillusioned homeless woman.

Many of the scenes are genuinely nice. Some moments are even downright nice. But overall, the whole thing just doesn't quite want to work. True, there is a cohesive element with the search for Yu and the slowly developing friendship with Marco. And yet, too often the film doesn't feel like it's all of a piece, but strangely pieced together and choppy. Many of the short storylines are nice in their own right, but add little to the story itself.

So I phone you is a nice patchwork story that is convincing at some moments, and somewhat inconsequential at others. As a result, the end result is just a nice mix of comedy and drama, a work made with a lot of love and charm, but which in the end fails to evoke any real emotion. If the movie is on TV, it's definitely worth tuning in. But going to the cinema is not really necessary

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp