4 ideas
Doris, a young typist in a Rhineland provincial city, loses her office job and lies her way into bit parts at the local theatre. In Berlin she drifts between men, cafés and borrowed apartments and ends up alone in a train-station waiting room, still without the stardom she came for.
Doris sets out to write her life 'like a film': a sequence of vivid images, surfaces and glamorous scenes. Seeing experience through cinema's frame lets her aestheticize hardship and stay the heroine of her own story.
For someone without money, connections or credentials, visible luxury goods like a fur, the right clothes or a smart address work as the only available proof of belonging to a higher class. Because these markers can be stolen, borrowed or supplied by a man, the identity they create is fragile. It depends entirely on keeping up appearances and disappears the moment the object or the patron does.
Doris befriends Brenner, a war-blinded veteran, and goes out to collect sights, sounds and scenes of Berlin so she can describe the city to him. The act of translating the city for someone who cannot see it forces her to notice and name what she would otherwise pass through. Here the city's glitter sits beside the damaged men and poverty the war left behind.