Barbara Beutler

Five more-or-less distinct sections, all featuring "Freak" Orlando, a woman played by the late Magdalena Montezuma, who appears in various guises and deformities throughout.

The first film in Rudolf Thome's "Forms of Love" trilogy is the most incisive. It's a comedy-drame chronicling the ups and downs in the relationship of an unmarried couple (Adriana Altaras, Vladimir Weigl). When she tries to persuade him that they should have a child, he escapes the controversy by becoming preoccupied with his new aquarium and microscope. Their struggles to settle their differences and accept new responsibilities are presented intelligently, realistically and with low-key wit and irony.

A treatise on love and desire tainted by harsh reality of capitalism, in which submission to the laws of lust-as-commerce is played out by five prostitutes and their pimp, who pits them against one another so that they are incapable of standing up to him collectively.