Hermine Huntgeburth | Das Trio (The Trio) / 1998

straight out of farce

by Douglas Messerli

 

Horst Johann Sczerba, Volker Einrauch, and Hermine Huntgeburth (screenplay), Hermine Huntgeburth (director) Das Trio (The Trio) / 1998

 

Derek Elley of Variety writes of German director Hermine Huntgeburth’s The Trio that the director “allows the comedy to come naturally from the characters and situations instead of trying to squeeze the story into a camp comedy format. Performances are natural rather than overplayed, and ellipses in the narrative keep things moving without dwelling on the moral implications of the characters’ actions. Once the new trio’s chemistry is established, pic moves easily to a warm conclusion.”

     But, in fact, at least from my point of view, the film stabs, stamps, spits, and noisily spins its way through space, doing everything but behaving naturally or underplayed as its three major figures attempt to deceive and betray each other in order to fulfill their desires. “Greed” might be another title to this comic work, as first Zobel (Götz George), his gay lover Karl (Christian Redl), and Zobel’s daughter from an earlier heterosexual liaison, Lizzi (Jeanete Hain) descend upon train stations, shopping centers, and any other large gathering spaces to pickpocket its denizens. This trio not only is clever in how quickly they rid themselves of their hot goods, but have trained to how to escape the clutches of the robbed or the police if nabbed, Lizzi being a particularly clever escapee.

      Karl, who occasionally entertains his bed-mate Zobel in the trailer in which they live with private drag shows, is clearly tired of their antics, at one point continuing to read a magazine and Lizzi attempts to escape capture, receiving an abusive put-down by his lover.

     But when he puts on the glasses of a blind man determined to bump into a man on the street in order to relieve him of his billfold, the man is not at all ready to forgive his “accident,” but begins to beat him for his apparent clumsiness, breaking his glasses as Karl is forced to go on the run.

    Terrified for the consequences—even more abuse from Zobel—and feeling completely inept he is almost ready to leap to his death from a walkway on the highway below until Lizzi and Zobel call out. They temporarily retrieve him, but soon after he walks dizzily into the line of a car, and is seriously hit and badly injured. The rest of the film he rests in a hospital before his death late in the film.

     Zobel and Lizzi, accordingly, must seek out a new third man, Lizzi choosing a local mechanic named Rudolf (Felix Eitner) whom she observes stealing a car radio. After a few tests, a great deal of abuse, and tossing the boy’s green, apparently harmless, snake out of the car window, Zobel agrees, Rudolf appearing more capable than Karl, if a bit ambitious; he almost gets caught after attempting to pick-pocket a man in a shopping center Lizzi has warned him against. But he cleverly keeps the wallet beneath his shoe, resulting in a small windfall for the trio.

     Compared to real thieves, this trio’s activities, sometimes themselves snaring true white-collar criminals, is truly petty, most of their money going to maintain their meagre survival—their greatest vice being horse-race gambling. And in this sense their actions play out a bit like characters out of Guys and Dolls, instead of us recognizing them as true criminals.

      But when it comes to sex, all three, Zobel, Lizzi, and even the bi-sexual Rudolf go all out to get what they want, Lizzi almost raping Rudolf in a camp-ground locker room, and Zobel actually engaging in sex with Rudolf soon after—despite his rule No. 1: “There shall be no exchange in the trio of bodily liquids.”

      And it is finally Lizzi’s discovery that her father has also had sex with the man she finds to be so desperately hot that breaks up, at least temporarily, the team. Furious, Lizzi leaves, Zobel sending Rudolf to fetch her or be killed.

       We don’t quite know how long it takes, but eventually he returns, having wed her. In the midst of the previous mayhem, we watch a scene that might have been located at the ending of the film, with Rudolf, now in Karl’s old tux, performing in a carney as the ringmaster of an amateur wrestling concession. He returns to the trailer and to a wife who looks now a bit like the cliché of “trailer trash,” along with a daughter and son.

       But Huntgeburth does not end the film there, but uses it to either to serve as a warning or show us the results of a series of mean and heedless events. Taking us on the trajectory of this ending, the director first shows the trio now working on a train, stealing mostly from sleeping coach car travelers before themselves changing coaches and planting the cash in other traveler’s coats and garments which they later reclaim

       In one horrible scene, however, Rudolf steals the purse of the train’s conductor. He is caught by the police and identified by the conductor; yet when searched nothing is found. They search the nearby Zobel only to find that Rudolf has planted the purse in his pocket. It is off to prison, a rather long stretch for papa, while Rudolf and Lizzi beget their daughter and son.

  The film ends, however, somewhat amiably, not at all as the nightmare we have already witnessed, with Zobel’s granddaughter opening up an old ladies’ purse and stealing its contents before serving it up to her grandfather. As the four walk down the board walk of a seaside town, with Rudolf and Lizzi locked arm and arm, their daughter by their side, Zobel’s cops of deep feel of Rudolf’s ass, to which the son-in-law seems not at all perturbed. Obviously, there still may be further betrayals in store. But no, I’d repeat to that Variety critic that it wasn’t at all natural or comically underplayed. The trio are straight out of farce.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025)