Good idea lost in the noise

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The story of Laurens M. Wagner, a shy workaholic bureaucrat and his life-changing relationship with the unconventional girl, Gina Kohlmeier, he meets in a café. "Frühstück mit einer Unbekannten" (Suddenly Gina) is a remake of the hugely successful BBC movie "The Girl In The Café". The adaption adheres on the whole to the original, allows themselves in addition, a few references to the German politics, policy and the specific fuss about Heiligendamm. The much discussed safety fence is here for example a large topic and the film captivates by the fact that it allows us to see behind the curtain of the business and affairs in global politics."Frühstück mit einer Unbekannten" is an unusual love story and the cast is excellent. It is younger, sweeter and lighter but the political side is just as pronounced as in the original "The Girl In the Café". It is more of a classical romantic comedy with a political twist. The role of Gina Kohlmeier is played by Julia Jentsch, renowned for her award-winning portrayal of the heroine in "Sophie Scholl". Further are to be seen: Stefan Kurt, Andrea Sawatzki, Jördis Triebel and Catherine Deneuve. While Julia Jentsch carries her role marvelously and ensures outstanding soft moments, Jan Josef Liefers convinces by his reserved, naive kind.

Yes, indeed, it's a German cover version of the 2005 BBC/HBO production "The Girl in the Café", an immensely likable and brilliantly performed little film written by Richard Curtis and directed by David Yates, starring the always excellent Bill Nighy and the wonderful Kelly Macdonald. Unfortunately, most German cover versions suck. This one's no exception. Liefers and Jentsch are badly miscast as the somewhat stuffy, uptight Treasury adviser and the girl he meets in a café, falls in love with and subsequently takes to the German G8 summit in Heiligendamm where she confronts the political hot shots with the naked truth about world hunger, poverty and injustice, thus changing the outcome of the meeting. Worse still, the undynamic duo can't hold a drippy candle to Nighy and Macdonald. Watching Liefers mimic Nighy's quirky body language will literally make you cringe with pain, whereas Jentsch's bland and utterly unbelievable performance once again proves that she couldn't act her way out of a pay toilet.The script doesn't do them any favors, though. The setting was unwisely moved from icy Reykjavik with its shades of blue and gray to Heiligendamm with its palette of brown and golden, which makes for a dramatic change in tone and atmosphere. And while, in the original movie, Gina was a tough and heavily accented young Scotswoman fresh out of jail where she did time for "hurting a man" who "killed a (her?) child", here she is a joyful, clean-cut and blatantly naive midwife(!) who leads a Bohemian life in a fancy apartment shared with a wacky friend and speaks typical acting-class German without so much as the slightest trace of an accent - a small, but fateful shift of character that thoroughly ruins the structure of the story. Like in so many German films, virtually all of the dialog is clumsy and stilted and sounds like a poor translation of Richard Curtis's original lines even when it isn't. And where "The Girl in the Café" was funny and touching, "Frühstück mit einer Unbekannten" (Breakfast with an Unknown Woman) is merely witless, boring and shallow - the jokes fall flat, the romantic scenes are anemic, and the characters are dull. Worst of all, though, it not only features a - completely unnecessary - cameo by Catherine Deneuve (what the hell is that woman doing in this dud?) - but also a tacked-on happy ending which finally turns the film into a dreadful piece of slushy fluff.Unfortunately, poorly written, poorly acted and poorly directed junk like this is fairly representative of German TV which, on the whole, is light-years removed from state-of-the-art international fare like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Carnivàle, Wonderfalls, State of Play, The Lakes, Cracker, Murder One, Life on Mars, Epitafios, Vientos de Agua or La Meglio gioventù (to name but a few; the list is endless). If you're looking for well-made, high-quality television - sophisticated both intellectually and aesthetically - you'll have to go elsewhere. Sad, but true.