When he makes friends with his best customer, Bernd, and falls in love with Clarissa, to whom he delivers Bernd's love letters almost every day and begins to modify some customers' deliveries, he grows out of his role as courier, abandoning all work ethics and getting mixed up in things that quickly get out of the young man's control and prove as exciting as his fantasies...

 
• In German-language films of the 90s, Generation X-type heterosexual comedies are as much an old hat as techno movies with drugged youths crossing old sexual boundaries are on the international scene. And two weeks before this one was released in Germany, the film Härtetest [no international titel at the time this article was written] in which - with uncanny similarity - a female leftist bicycle courier has to cope with neo-nazi car drivers. But still, even those who have withstood all the various interpretations of this sub-genre, such as travelling film critics, will discover in Tempo an oasis of German-speaking film art, destined to become a compulsory part of good Swiss, Austrian and German film students' studies. Apart from the fact that Tempo is the only really good German-speaking film to come out so far this year, and certainly one of the wittiest in cinema as a whole, director Stefan Ruzowitzki has made cinematic history by being the first to use the MOVIECAM SL camera in a feature film. The speed at which the camera can pan, stop and pan back is simply breathtaking.

Tempo is, additionally, the only contribution to cinema about the rave generation which does not commit the error of concentrating on contrived techno parties, laced with allegedly necessary cinematic superlatives. Jojo and his flatmate/friend Bastian (Xaver Hutter and Simon Schwarz, ingeniously cast) do go to parties in a giant gasometer, but this takes up only a fraction of the screen time and not only captures the authentic party atmosphere, but also the mood on setting off, when chilling out leads to particularly profound, totally unrealistic perceptions of reality, which have a direct bearing on the plot.
 

Enough interpretation. In one wonderful parody of a scene, Ruzowitzki has Jojo sitting with his new mentor and friend Bernd in a Cabriolet on a hill overlooking Vienna, enjoying the view of the night sky, when the actually rather heterosexual Bernd seduces the actually rather heterosexual Jojo. Of course, the whole thing does bring to mind the idea of homosexuality as a by-product of the wayward life of a rebel, somewhere between drug-taking and involvement in homicide. This feeling is emphasised by a line spoken by Jojo at the end of the film: "My God - I've earned my first money, had my first apartment and slept with a woman for the first time..." The very first sexual experience - with a man - is not mentioned here, and so is unwanted.

It is in this light that one could view the unusually full treatment given to Jojo's sexual confusion after this homoerotic adventure, but this is not necessary. In fact, the treatment of Jojo's search for himself departs in a positive way from the usual treatment in other films. Somewhat naively, perhaps, but pragmatically, he masturbates successfully to gay magazines (but at his age, as he discovers to his dismay, this also works with telephone directories), and watches his friend Bernd showering from unusual perspectives. Bernd, however, is supremely laid-back about the whole thing and just asks if he could help his flat-mate in this way. Unfortunately, Jojo has to say no, as Bastian's body in particular is, for him, not exactly the last word in attractiveness. Apart from the resulting laughter, it is clear that Jojo is quite capable of finding other men attractive. But the film takes no absolute stand on that issue and Ruzowitzki, who also wrote the screenplay, is just as revolutionary with one particular dialogue as he is with his use of the MOVIECAM SL: Jojo is quite adamant that he did not have a homosexual experience: it was homoerotic. That is, even if he ends up basically heterosexual, this does not rule out episodes with members of the same sex. Interestingly, Jojo does not bear any grudge against Bernd on account of the Cabrio episode, even though he does on other accounts, and the film parodies ravers' grudges against the exotic life of merciless normality, and particularly the stringent Austrian laws which discriminate against gays with Jojo's angry exclamation to an official: "I can look after my own ass!", which is splashed over two pages of the press notes. But this is all done without any kind of hip shock effect à la Crash.

Whether or not Ruzowitzki agrees with our Queer Watchlion is not an issue here, Tempo still has these effects.
 

Filmdata:

Official link:  http://www.saarbruecken.de/sbnet/04/filmhaus/mop_d1.htm#tempo