It's Berlin, baby! A person in love with a creative itch is always characterized by the desire to perpetuate his muse. This fate did not pass and the director Oliver Riis, who moved to the noisy ramshackle Berlin from quiet Switzerland and decided to express his love for the German capital through the film “The Black Sheep”. The confession, however, came out with a sweetness, so it is better to remove especially impressionable personalities, as well as the elderly, children, pregnant women and clergy from the screens before watching. And the point here is not that most of the characters of the film resemble the characters of Bosch’s paintings, and the most decent of the topics discussed is the morning riser (and we are not talking at all about the metropolitan traffic jams). And not even that while watching you literally rolled all kinds of liquids contained in the human body, and tortured by the torn shooting and trembling of the camera, making you feel nausea and dizziness. It's all unpleasant, but not fatal. In addition, the director, not alien to humanity, took care of the audience, in which the picture, according to him, should cause not vomiting, but laughter, and made the film in monochrome with light intersperses of colored spots in the climax.
Much more frightening for these impressionable people will be the regular crossing of Riis of the fine line of morality and generally accepted norms, which he commits with such ease and speed that the viewer does not even have time to be afraid, and already violates a couple of commandments and ten prohibitions of Rospotrebnadzor. And where else can we cross these borders but in Berlin, a city that hastily washed up along the line of the Wall that was torn down twenty years ago and stands on the verge of past and future, socialism and capitalism, East and West? There is a saying that in order to be happy here, you do not have to be rich. Well, the characters of the film “Live Sheep” fully meet this condition, but happiness in their lives at first glance is not noted. For the time being, though. After all, the heroes represented in this creation are none other than modernized characters of old fairy tales, and Oliver Riis acts here either in the role of Rumplestiltskin spinning gold from straw, or rather from rubbish – a work of art, or in the role of a storyteller of a new era, and after the Brothers Grimm creates a new Berlin mythology.
He breaks his work into five stories, each of whose characters, like Ellie, Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow and Iron Woodcutter, walk through the gray-bricked streets of Berlin in search of who is happiness, who is love, who is wealth, who is just sexual pleasure. And, of course, as in any fairy tale, they will find something. After all, fairy tales tend to end well, even if they begin with a story about how the eternal loser-swindler, who once worked as a model for the demonstration of watches, fell in love with a beautiful and inaccessible princess and for her and for the sake of getting insurance cut off the very valuable part of the body on which he wore these watches.
The beautiful queen in these stories for her addiction to unconventional sex, so hotly disliked by MP Mizulina, is nicknamed Analyta; Cinderella works as a guide on a sightseeing boat and hides an alcoholic prince from her successful acquaintances; three piglets, pretending to be three sexually preoccupied Turks, go in search of erotic adventures, but under the influence of hallucinogens they find themselves in the country of Oz somewhere in the area of Muggelse; two hippie students growing cannabis on trees, like Hansel and Gretel, instead of a witch’s hut, fall into the apartment of a bohemian gay man who, unlike his evil predecessor, does not at all try to eat them, although he does not eat them with a cup.
And of course, as in every fairy tale, there is apotheosis, which is embodied in the story under the code name “Sleeping Beauty” about the awakening of a comatose grandmother by a satanic grandson. It is this episode that puts the entire film in the category “21+”, or even all “31+”, and the stories about it are told in a quiet whisper by shocked witnesses. True, in their description, everything seems much more creepy than it appears on the screen, and who knows whether the real prince woke up this sleeping beauty with a kiss or mastered her in the posture of searching for slippers under the sofa?
In general, it seems that the smoke of Berlin hemp caused an extremely powerful explosion in the brain of Riis, who had previously inhaled only the fragrances of alpine meadows, so with the consciousness of the viewer he is trying to do the same, then dipping his head into impurities, then turning all moral values over with a light kick, as a result, giving out of all this thrash, shot for pennies, a film that can cause you a variety of feelings and emotions except indifference.