(Cert 15)

This simple, precise, painfully truthful German movie, edited to the bone, deals with the destructive power of irresistible romantic love as it threatens settled relationships, here made all the more dangerous and potentially tragic as the characters are lower-middle-class Berliners in their late 60s and 70s. The homely 65-year-old seamstress Inge, contentedly married, experiences a coup de foudre with Karl, a 75-year-old widower, whose trousers she's been mending. He has a glancing resemblance to the elderly Charlton Heston, she has the sad, tired eyes of Dianne Wiest, but otherwise they don't much resemble movie stars. Their lovemaking has a clumsy passionate realism, and the director challenges us to patronise them by averting our eyes. This is a deeply moving film, immaculately acted.