Fantastic!

Dreadfully Boring

Charming and brutal

A Major Disappointment

Europe, she loves is an intimate portrait of four parings all over Europe. The European aspect only gets shown in various audio clips and like a time capsule, shows some desparation in the poorer countries Europe has to offer (Estonia, Greece, Spain and Ireland). The main personas are smoking all the time and don't even get much pleasure from doing drugs. As did I from watch this documentary. It is beautifully shot, but it goes from uninteresting discussion to uninteresting discussion, dispersed by some enviromental scenes shot from a car. The music, with some exceptions, stays ambient or is gone. Some scenes are definitely staged, while I believe that some scenes are not. As I read from an interview, the film team had 10 days at every location. Maybe the movie ahould habe been shorter. It is a cool time capsule, maybe, but I have more fun watching a reality docu such as "Armes Deutschland" where the people seem more relatable and more interesting things happen.

Described as a documentary but filmed like a feature film in which the 'actors' seem to be playing variations of themselves, Jan Gassmann's "Europe, she loves" is a virtually plot less look at the lives of four couples in four European cities. Judging by the fairly explicit sex scenes it is unlikely it can be described as pure documentary; everything is obviously staged. It's also not very interesting. Fundamentally we all seem to live very boring lives in which nothing very much happens. If there is a thread running through the picture it's economic deprivation. Gassmann's protagonists definitely come from the lower end of the economic spectrum and since he doesn't picture them in any kind of positive light the film feels more than vaguely like exploitation. It's certainly of its time so it is naturally depressingly prescient. It's most definitely the antithesis of feel-good.