Männer sind zum Lieben da

The Girls from Atlantis

Eight young women from an unknown realm emerge from a forest lake near Munich. Their mission: to sleep with as many men as possible, shrinking them down in the process to take them home in suitcases, because men are a rare commodity where they come from. Most of them find the task easy. But Atlantis is different. All of her attempts at seduction – of a homosexual porn trader, a dubious priest, a sex consultant – fail. Until she meets Raoul, whom she genuinely loves … 

At the peak of the soft-sex movie craze, shrewd autodidact Eckhart Schmidt created a charming parody of the genre. As a member of the New Munich Group of filmmakers under the spell of beautiful superficiality, he proved to have his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. The shapely form of his comely heroine was the cinematic version of the early pop era’s girlie trend. While the only future role for her adversaries in the battle of the sexes is as sex slaves, this male dream/nightmare is constructed as a summer fantasy – in a film narrative somewhere "between rollicking burlesque and profound poetry" (Schmidt, 1997).

Source: 75. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)