Good start, but then it gets ruined

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

If you want to get the feel of life in East Germany and of life in the 70s, this is your film. It is critical of the socialist system (national socialism ended in 1945, afterwards there was no Nazi-propaganda anywhere anymore, especially not in the East! Sorry, but another reviewer got this wrong), offers a romantic story and good acting by well-known actors. It is still cult in Berlin, where you can regularly see in the cinema. It kicked off the wave of east-German nostalgia. The film was so successful that today you can still see references to it in other films (eg. "Sonnenallee") and that the city decided to name a path along a lake "Paul und Paula Ufer" with a Paul und Paula bench to sit on. Also the soundtrack is worth listening to (especially the lyrics) and marked the beginning of the Puhdys'huge career.

Paul and Paula go through life picking the wrong partners until they happen to hook up with each other and the legend begins. Low-budget German film has the look of a cheesy porno movie. The script is pretty standard boy-meets-girl story. The acting by Domrose (as Paula, who seems to work in an amazingly busy grocery store or something and has wild mood swings) and Glatzeder (as the goofy Paul) is not bad, considering the clichéd characters they are playing. The direction is amateurish, with incongruous shots of buildings being demolished thrown in. The soundtrack is filled with bad German pop songs, although it is interesting that they get the lyrics to rhyme even after translating to English.

"Die Legende von Paul und Paula" (1973), co-written and directed by Heiner Carow, is a famous film in Germany. The story seems tame enough now--a young woman is dissatisfied with her life and takes active steps to improve it.Angelica Domröse plays Paula, a single mother who has a dead-end job and no social life. Winfried Glatzeder portrays Paul, who is unhappily married and is drawn to the free-spirited Paula. (Glatzeder has been called East Germany's Jean-Paul Belmondo. He didn't look much like Belmondo, and wouldn't have struck me as leading man material. However, I don't know enough about East German cinema to be aware of his competition.)I've been told that the reason for this film's popularity in East Germany was because it contained subtle criticism of the regime, as well as depicting some PG-13 sex. I know East German films were subject to strict censorship, and, as in any similar regime, directors inserted criticisms in ways that were necessarily very indirect and symbolic.The problem is that this movie only works if you can think of how you would have viewed it in East Berlin in 1973. I don't believe it's strong enough to succeed on its own merits in 2006.

This picture, which has been shown in East Germany for only a week until political censors understood its impact on the people, is a very realistic East German view of life in post war East Berlin. It's mainly about the romance of Paul, a privileged but unhappy secret service agent, and Paula, an underprivileged and single girl with children. Since it is one of the very few movies which portraits honest details of real life in East Berlin at that time, it now serves as a reminder of emotions and feelings for a lot of East Germans. Despite the heavy use of symbolism (pretty old houses are blown away for the construction of uniform socialist buildings) it still doesn't draw a too pessimistic picture and leaves space for dreams and hope. I really love this movie, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to catch a glimpse idea of how life was at that time in a socialistic system. The film is available with English subtitles which gives foreigners the chance to understand it, too.