Eine flexible Frau

When 40-year-old Greta (Mira Partecke), mother of a twelve-year-old son and separated from her partner, loses her job as an architect, she starts working in a call center, but is soon made redundant again. She tries with all her might not to let it get her down, starts drinking and wanders through Berlin between empty lots and fancy townhouses, torn between the pressure to conform and a spirit of defiance. “You need to be a bit more flexible!” advises call center manager (Laura Tonke), but Greta is not prepared to submit to the ideology required. Laura Tonke’s sharp performance is less an embodiment than a quotation. Like the film as a whole, she is a repository of the contemporary clichés, attitudes and phrases of globalized capitalism. (bik)