“Head over heels”: When Otto Jaus steals the wrong car

What are weddings good for? In feature films, mostly to seal what the audience has been secretly waiting for. What belongs together comes together, chaos dissolves into harmony, you can go.

For “Hals Über Kopf” director and screenwriter Andreas Schmied (“Love Machine”, “Klammer”) symbolically drove an excavator over this old dramaturgical trick. However, this destruction suits the new movie. Because it’s going to be exciting in a charming way…

Miriam Fussenegger from Luftenberg embodies the banker’s daughter Ella Lannau, who finds out minutes before her marriage that her soon-to-be deceased is a “corrupt Oaschloch”.

The spoiled and resistant woman discovered something on a data stick that could exonerate her respected father (August Zirner) in a corruption scandal. Her idea of ​​discreetly conveying this to the investigating special commission ends up as a bride hiding in the trunk of a Bentley. Why a renegade waiter steals this luxury car from her reception is left open in an amusing way by “Head Over heels”.

Is it the debts for the mafia-like “Uncle Siggi” (Thomas Maurer) that drive him to do this? Or does the dream of children and the apartment of his still loved ones let him slip into old, petty criminal patterns?

Two things are fixed: Otto Jaus gives him as a rascal whose mentality as Strizzi is as typically Viennese as his name: Richie Javotnik. And the acting half of “Pizzera & Jaus” forms a wonderfully unlikely couple with Fussenegger, who are bound together by fate. How it works? It has to do with another element of the wedding film: the daughter cutting her cord off her father. That also takes Schmied to another level.

It was probably inspired by the great screwball comedies from the USA in the 1930s/40s: social differences, the esprit of “Romeo & Juliet”, fireworks of punch lines and dialogue. The latter sometimes come across more like a gentle drizzle in this film, especially when you’re struggling to do justice to the comedy form. But if the joke comes directly from the game and bizarre situations, you experience great pleasure.

Unlike modern (US) comedy, Schmied also manages to do this beyond bodily fluids such as blood, sweat and tears. And it’s also productions like these that bring the often gloomy domestic cinema closer to the cheerful. A walk in front of the altar of both styles is inevitable for the film country Austria anyway, otherwise the walk to the dogs begins.

“head over heels”: A 2023, 84 min., in cinemas from today

OÖN rating: four out of six stars