“The Messenger” and “Cloud 9″ on DVD

The tragedy of war in "The Messenger" and the joy of sexagenarian sex in "Cloud 9" hit home.

Never underestimate the hypnotic force of merely attending to human beings. Andreas Dresen’s “Cloud 9″ is a further case in point, a German romance and infidelity drama that’s notorious, I suppose, for the fact that its protagonists are all senior citizens, and they fuck. (Graphically, if not hardcore-ish-ly.) The gray-panther trope isn’t just a stunt, though – the ultra-realistic characters, being old, aren’t fraught with neuroses or motivations or ego, and so they’re allowed, in a perfectly natural way, to bask in simple acts of physical kindness and sensual pleasures that aren’t orgasmic, just intimate. Inge (Ursula Werner) is a housewife in her late 60s whose older husband Werner (Horst Rehberg) requires a certain amount of physical care at home; otherwise, her days are taken up in the quiet, minute-to-minute ways senior citizens have, with earning cash as a seamstress and practicing with her senior center choral group. At the film’s outset, however, she delivers altered pants to aging widower Karl (Horst Westphal) and impulsively screws him, on the spot.

From there, Inge resists and then succumbs to additional liaisons, with the director potently contrasting the senior center horsecrap and her genuinely rapturous encounters with Werner, backlighting the dead-end scenarios we write for our elder population as opposed to the fleshy, more hedonistic possibilities they could pursue. Then Inge spills the beans to her husband, out of guilt, and a thunderstorm forms over what was a placid marital field for over 30 years.

“Cloud 9″ is all texture, and obviously a movie about infidelity featuring old people required a degree of finesse – one sharp decision was the casting of Werner, who is an accomplished German actress in a career that stretches back to the ‘60s, but who is also, forgive me, homely. It would’ve been quite the Hollywood movie to cast a hot 67-year-old in the role – think about it, Anna Karina is still 69 – but instead Dresen focused on a woman we see the likes of everyday, whom we never dream of having a sexual appetite or the capacity to uproot the middle-class world she’s been anchored to her whole life because, simply, she’s in love and feels good. There are costs incurred, but the film’s natural-lighting realism is never compromised for fireworks. And that last shot – just an expression, a close-up of Rehberg, but for reasons I’m not sure of, it’s a hammerblow.

“The Messenger” (Oscilloscope Laboratories) is now available on DVD and Blu-ray; “Cloud 9” (Music Box Films) is now available on DVD.

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