Valeska Grisebach's Longing is also about love, loss and infidelity involving a couple in their thirties who became lovers as teenagers. But here, they're small-town, German, blue-collar and inarticulate. He's a metal worker and his adoring wife lives for him and their small son. While he's away from home attending a boozy training session for auxiliary firemen, he goes to bed with an attractive waitress and spends a couple of nights with her.

At the beginning of the film, he's the first person on the scene as a couple attempt suicide in a car crash. Later, as his marriage falls apart, a mysterious, not dissimilar incident occurs in one of his own relationships. This strange, elliptical work is an extraordinary movie about ordinary people, a little like the first pictures by French movie-maker Bruno Dumont ( La vie de Jesus, L'Humanite ), but more animated.