Ich denke oft an Piroschka

I was expecting your typical colourful, sickly-sweet, inane, trashy, multicoloured, forget-the-war, 1950ies eyecandy. In fact I only saw this because I'd read in an article that in German carnival, a Piroschka costume is as popular a costume for females as pirate, cowboy or Indian costumes are for men.

In other words, I wasn't exactly bracing myself for a staggering cinematic experience.

What I got was a captivating, timeless, epic and utterly charming love story. Naive, yes. Construed, you bet. Psychedelically coloured, hell yeah. A fairy tale. But one that knocked me dead. Lilo Pulver, a Swiss German who already has a hard a time hiding her Swiss German accent, affects a silly Hungarian patois, but she more than makes up for it by creating the phenotype of a sassy, vervy ingénue who has to fight her mundane "blonde poison" adversary (Wera Frydtberg) for the love of doe-eyed German student dreamboat (apparently) Andreas (Gunnar Möller).

This movie is an enormous accomplishment of director Kurt Hoffman (I know, I'd never heard of this guy either). Everything is just perfectly in place, spot-on. There are 999 ways of getting this movie wrong, just one way of getting it right, and Hoffman nailed it.

Girls, if you ever wondered "what men want", forget Cosmo and Sex In The City -- here's the blueprint.