Klaras Hochzeit

Enrico Sabatini, a 70-year-old Italian olive oil producer, has traveled to Baden-Baden to have his painful gout treated. While surveying the colorful bustle of the weekly market there he suddenly catches sight of an attractive woman aged about 60 cycling past him happily. He immediately sets off in pursuit of her in his car. At a traffic light he manages to throw a small message into her bicycle basket, then he zooms away. Klara Drost # the woman in question # starts off by thinking it's a letter bomb, since she is a high-ranking civil servant: a department head at the EU agriculture ministry in Brussels. She goes to the police, where she finally gets reassured. That it is only a small message from someone called Enrico... Then she suddenly realizes who the impudent Italian must have been # a former fellow student with whom she had a brief but turbulent affair 40 years previously. Enrico seems to have checked into the same hotel as Klara, and soon crosses her path again. Enrico finally manages to persuade her to have dinner with him # even though she actually has a date in Strasbourg with her fiancé. Gerhart Kogge, Klara's handsome and athletic 60-year-old colleague, wants to marry her now that both of them are on the verge of retirement age. Over dinner it's very much like the old days: they argue over the same old trivial things. But they also tell one another what has happened over the past 40 years. Both are now widowed, and Enrico now resorts to all his charm to win Klara over # not an easy matter, considering how temperamental, hot-blooded and argumentative the two of them are! Enrico then finds out about Klara's fiancé, Gerhart. Appalled, and shaken with jealousy, he tells her he cannot believe how anyone would choose to spend the rest of their life with such a tedious little bureaucrat, and insists that Gerhart is not the right person for her. Klara considers Enrico just as impudent as ever, but the two of them still look at one another with mingled yearning and regret, and we can sense that there's something irrevocable between them... The rather confused Klara now meets up with her Gerhart. He proudly shows her the photos of their last yachting trip together: gray sea, gray sky, flat land in the distance now and then, and Klara and Gerhart wrapped up in North German fur coats against the cold. The wedding is still eight days away, and the glossy photos # on which the gray seagulls can scarcely be made out against the gray sky # make it quite clear where the couple might be spending their honeymoon... Nevertheless, since her confusing encounter with Enrico, Klara is quite convinced that marrying Gerhart is the right thing, despite the fact that her unimaginative fiancé, of all people, finds 'living in sin' rather to his taste. Just as the two of them are discussing the matter in the Euro-canteen in Strasbourg, who should suddenly appear on the scene but Enrico # in the company of Romano Prodi, the highest-ranking member of the Commission. Klara grabs the unwitting and consequently rather astonished Gerhart and makes a run for it, dragging him off to his apartment. There she tries to interest him in an amorous afternoon session, but duty-conscious civil servant that he is, he refuses to take the rest of the day off, saying surely they've both grown out of that stage... Back in the office, Gerhart tries to find out the identity of the man Prodi was having lunch with. He discreetly starts an investigation into Enrico. Meanwhile Klara has set off for Brussels, and in the plane she meets up with Enrico # who else. He seems to be pursuing her wherever she goes. Again he does everything in his power to persuade her to pick up where they left off 40 years previously. She tells him of course that their accidental meeting and empty relationship back then was nothing to base any hopes on, but at the same time she whispers to him, once the plane is on its way to Brussels, that the recent evening with him was the nicest one she'd