Meier

Original post date: 20 May 1987
Rating: ✭✭✰✰

 This is an ironic caper comedy that could only take place in Berlin. Ede Meier is a young paperhanger in East Berlin who comes into an inheritance. He buys a fake West German passport, leaves East Germany, and takes a fabulous trip around the world. (Everyone thinks he’s vacationing in Bulgaria.) But when he comes back to West Berlin, he goes back to his old life using a visitor’s visa to cross into East Berlin. He lives a double life as an East Berliner by day and a West Berliner by night. He comes up with a scheme to smuggle plain white rough-textured wallpaper into the East and claim that he invented it on his own home printing press. You see, in East Germany they only make wallpaper with ugly patterns that everybody hates and that takes twice as long to hang because you have to match up that pattern. Ede’s life is complicated as he tries keeping his secret from everyone including his straight arrow, party member girl friend. Everything goes okay until the night he is awarded a medal as a “worker hero” for his invention. After a night of partying he realizes that he is about to miss the deadline for getting back to West Berlin and makes a mad dash for the border crossing. Panicky and half drunk, he pulls out the wrong passport and...

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