Deutsch treat

NOBODY LOVES ME. Written and directed by Doris Dörrie. With Maria Schrader, Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss, Michael von Au, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Ingo Naujoks, Joachim Król, Peggy Parnass, and Larose Keller. A CFP Distribution, Inc. release. At the Kendall Square.

Ten years ago Doris Dörrie proved that the term "German comedy" was not an oxymoron with Men, a deft if shallow exploration of the title subject that was a smash in her homeland and a relative hit in this country. Her subsequent foray into the male psyche, Him and Me (1988), was not as successful: the story of a man who talked to his penis, it was never released here. In her newest film, she wisely turns her attention away from men and to women like herself. As a result Nobody Loves Me is her funniest and most accomplished effort yet. It's been the number one movie in Germany since last January, and though marred by a slight overdose of whimsy, it's so witty, imaginative, and thoughtful that Dörrie might find herself being referred to as the German female Woody Allen.

She's certainly found her Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow in Maria Schrader, a dark-haired pixie with droopy eyes, a cupid's-bow mouth, and an ebullience cut with a heavy dose of angst. She's the woefully named Fanny Fink, a single, nearing-30 gate-security person at the Cologne airport who fills her boyfriend-less spare time attending a course in "Conscious Dying." It's a cheery seminar in which she and her fellow students enthusiastically build coffins, imagine their corpses bloating, and in general indulge in a parody of the Nazi death culture as crossed by Berlin-style bohemianism and '90s self-help therapy that's both funny and deeply disturbed.

This is just one of Dörrie's bold comic gambles - as an observer of German society in its sexual, political, and multicultural flux, her film owes more to Rainer Werner Fassbinder than to Dieter of Saturday Night Live. The Germany of 1995 is seething from the onslaught of reunification, waves of foreign workers, and resurgent fascism, a time of turmoil not unlike the '70s of Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which film Nobody slyly imitates.

In this case, the dark stranger who changes Fanny's life goes by the unlikely name of Orfeo de Altamar (Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss), a cadaverous, body-painted African-German who adores a giant fetish; he has a knack for starting stalled elevators by chanting and dancing, and a gift for telling fortunes. His own fortune is on the wane, though: his lip-synching of Billie Holiday at a local gay bar is more earnest than alluring, his romance with a big-deal newscaster is fizzling, and the death that Fanny chicly courts is all too real a possibility for him. Fanny knows none of this. She seeks his advice, and his description of the love of her life bears an unfortunate resemblance to Lothar Sticker (Michael von Au), the neurotic, wimpy, ruthless building manager who's secretly plotting to evict all the tenants in Fanny's apartment building, beginning with Orfeo.

Actually, Dörrie could have done herself a favor and evicted some of these tenants from the script - their studied fancifulness comes off as a little strained. They're a game bunch of weirdos crying out for a sit-com to contain them - a gray-faced geriatric who intones "Alles ist scheiss!"; a woman with a lot of cats; a guy with a great big dog; a woman waiting for "them" to come and get her. It's a fitfully amusing group, but you'd rather not spend as much time with them in forced conversation in an elevator or a hallway as Dörrie would like you to.

The Orfeo/Fanny/Lothar triangle has a lot more potential, and Dörrie stirs it up with zest and dark glee and a knack for the diabolically exact detail. Believing from Orfeo's prophecy that Lothar is the one, further convinced by their shared traits of shyness, an obsession with death, and a fear of the dark (Fanny comforts herself with a teddy bear, Lothar with a squirrel with a fuzzy tale), Fanny stalks her unwitting and unwilling prey. Through ploys ranging from automobile accidents to stowing away in the trunk of a car, she manages to get him into bed, only to learn that his Armani suit and endearing ineptitude conceal the soul of a crass and grasping exploiter.

In short, the soul of contemporary German society at its worst. Nobody can be seen as a politically correct parable about the need for multiculturalism and the evil of greed and intolerance. Dörrie, though, aims at more. What that is she suggests by intercut shots of the Cologne carnival, a skewed allusion to Black Orpheus and the myth that Orfeo's name evokes. There's more at stake in Nobody than easy laughs and political points. It arises from a genuine vision of death, loss, loneliness, and a destiny made tenable only by a reaffirmation of love. That Nobody achieves this in a breezy entertainment everybody can love suggests that the future of German comedy is bright indeed.