Love Steaks

German comedy "Love Steaks" is a freewheeling ride of sensual explosions and formal experiments. There's no plot in the conventional sense, instead the movie is more or less just a collage of scenes featuring a wildly spirited cook and an introverted masseur at a seaside hotel. Through these seemingly random samples of their lives, the film invites the viewer to an up-close observation of the human emotions and domination game at play. In this regard it's very successful, as the improvisational setting lends every frame an air of reality and unpredictability while the performances by both lead actors, minutely captured by the camera's unwavering attention, emanate a dynamic naturalism that opens up all kinds of access ti their characters' inner worlds.

Visual focus on the flesh, both in the frying pan and on a massage bed, adds to the overall feel of raging carnality. The editing, brash and arbitrary, contributes to the edginess of the film, as does the eclectic, wonderfully aggressive but only sporadically employed music. In the end, though, one can't help but think all this technical achievement only serves to scratch a seductive surface and that the movie still comes up short in the narrative department. Without something meaningful and coherent on a more conscious level, even when director Jakob Lass manages to make us laugh to the array of pranks and faux pas', to take us to some intimate places with these peculiar characters, he still can't quite get us to care.