10/09/2010

Shown in competition at the Mostra, Three [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is Tom Tykwer’s take on the “ménage à trois”, a favourite theme in literature and film.

The director of Run Lola Run (in competition at Venice in 1998) and international productions Perfume: The Story of a Murderer [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and The International [+see also:
trailer
film profile] describes his new film as a romantic comedy: "We had a lot of fun on set. Three is full of romantic moments, because the protagonists fall in love, and without aiming to be funny, it reflects the actors’ emotional side”.

The story centres on an unmarried couple of forty-something Berliners, who have been together for 20 years. Hanna (Sophie Rois), an anthropologist, presents a cultural programme on TV, and Simon (Sebastian Schipper) organises art exhibitions. Separately and completely by chance, they both meet Adam (Devid Striesow), a stem cell researcher with a marriage behind him, a son and lots of interests.

The male and female protagonists are fascinated by this "third element", as he is by them, in an encounter combining creativity and biology. In the first sex scene between the two men, the scientist with the biblical name suggests to the other that he abandon his "biological determinist identity". For her part, Hanna falls democratically pregnant with twins but doesn’t know who the father is.

Three looks at extended family, open relationships and anthropological experiments in 21st-century society, an era full of openness but also a return to darkness. However, the film’s main focus is a generation of forty-somethings, the director’s generation, with their feelings, fears and cultural references. And there is a melancholy undertone behind the funny lines and optimistic, utopian ending.

Produced by X Filme Creative Pool (set up by Tykwer, Dani Levy and Wolfgang Becker with Stefan Arndt in 1994), the film will be released in Germany on December 23.

(Translated from Italian)