Line #66 Film/Friendship


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4	''Friendship!'' is a 2010 German coming-of-age film directed by Markus Goller and starring Friedrich Mücke and Creator/MatthiasSchweighofer.
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6	The UsefulNotes/BerlinWall fell and two lifelong friends from East Germany, Veit (Mücke) and Tom (Schweighöfer), want to travel to UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco, the former in order to find his father, whose only life sign since fleeing UsefulNotes/EastGermany is an annual birthday postcard to his son, always postmarked from the same post office in San Francisco. The pair's low budget only gets them a flight to New York and the rest isn't enough for a rail ticket, forcing them into an adventurous road trip across the country, never sure if they'll get to Frisco in time, and always needing to earn money to get there.
7	----
8	!!This film provides examples of:
9	* TheAllegedCar: Veit fantasizes about watching a Trabant driving down the Golden Gate Bridge [[spoiler:and the fantasy becomes reality in the end.]]
10	* AllGermansAreNazis: Default mode of the passport-checking policeman at JFK airport.
11	* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking
12	---> '''Veit:''' Dancing? OK. Undressing myself, sure. At a gay strip club, I don't mind. But not to the anthem of the GDR!
13	* ArtisticLicenseGeography: Veit says that San Francisco is "the westernmost point of the world..."
14	* BadassBiker: They meet some in Tennessee and one of them even trusts them to drive his brother's car back to California.
15	* BerserkButton: Never tell Veit that your father was a Communist, even if you're a drunk American biker who lost his father in Vietnam.
16	* BittersweetEnding: So {{Troperiffic}} that it's a mere technicality: [[spoiler:TheReveal in Frisco makes Veit suffer a HeroicBSOD, but the HeterosexualLifePartners reconcile from the LoveTriangle and they see TheAllegedCar crossing Golden Gate.]]
17	* BlackBossLady: The black policewoman who arrests Veit and Tom. May be just a low-ranking cop on patrol duty, but can definitely act quite authoritatively.
18	* ButNotTooForeign: Zoe.
19	* ClusterFBomb: Invoked and discussed at a diner in Tennessee.
20	* CoolCar: Brought back to you from your biking brother at the other end of the country by entrusting it to two foreign road trippers.
21	* [[spoiler:DeadAllAlong: Veit's father]]
22	* DirtyCommunists: Whenever they try to explain which part of Germany they come from, they often end up describing themselves like this, often with inconvenient consequences.
23	* TheDitz: Tom, at times.
24	* DrugsAreBad: Or whatever. Is there a trope out there to describe a car driver smoking weed from an apple bong?
25	* {{Eagleland}}: Both flavors, including:
26	** BigAppleSauce: where they land at first.
27	** FlyOverCountry: which they have to cross.
28	** VivaLasVegas: where much of the real action happens.
29	** UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco: which is their final destination.
30	* {{Expy}}: The first driver who picks them up as hitchhikers is a clear embodiment of Creator/JohnKricfalusi and the drawings in his car also clearly resemble ''WesternAnimation/TheRenAndStimpyShow'' cartoons.
31	* FishOutOfWater
32	* {{Flashback}}: Tom and Veit getting to know each other as schoolchildren and stretching aerials to receive Western radio.
33	* FromACertainPointOfView: Deconstructed. Veit always told Tom that his father died before they met and, when Tom finds out about the postcards somewhere in New York, argues that he said so because he was ''dead to him'' and [[ParentalAbandonment wanted to forget his father after he fled to the West]] and he feared that his real motivation for the journey would make Tom refuse to come. In the end we learn that [[spoiler:his father was in fact dead all along, [[AccidentalTruth but Veit couldn't know that]].]]
34	* [[spoiler:GovernmentConspiracy: The real story behind the postcards.]]
35	* HaHaHaNo
36	* HeroicBSOD: Veit after the revelation.
37	* HeterosexualLifePartners: After all, the movie is also about [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin true friendship!]]
38	---> '''Tom:''' From then on, Veit became my twenty-four!
39	* LockedOutOfTheLoop: Veit is a culprit [[spoiler:and a victim]] of this. Veit forces his own point of view on Tom when it comes to explaining his father's absence. [[spoiler:And the Stasi forced their own point of view on Veit's family]].
40	* LoveTriangle: Veit is so furious about Zoe spending the night with Tom that he drives to Frisco alone and leaves Tom behind at the motel. Tom later pettily complains that Veit could at least have told him which post office in Frisco they were going to.
41	* LukeIAmYourFather: Discussed. Zoe has to explain the plot of ''Star Wars'' to her unsavvy East German companions and finds parallels between Luke's quest in Star Wars and Veit's quest in the movie.
42	* MacGuffin: The birthday postcards to Veit are the pretext for the whole journey. Oh, the Darth Vader helmet and the lightsaber in the car trunk also enable [[LukeIAmYourFather the explanation above]].
43	* OnTheMoney: They show some creativity in earning money on their trip.
44	* ParentalAbandonment: Veit's father.
45	* PoliticallyCorrectHistory: Averted. As the movie is set in 1990, New York City is correctly depicted with the Twin Towers.
46	* PopCulturalOsmosisFailure: Having grown up behind the UsefulNotes/IronCurtain, Veit and Tom didn't know ''Franchise/StarWars'' before Zoe tells them about it.
47	* RedOniBlueOni: Tom is red, Veit is blue.
48	* TheReveal: Veit's father [[spoiler:was actually killed at the UsefulNotes/BerlinWall. The birthday postcards were sent by another emigrant who made a deal with the Stasi who allowed him to go west if he agreed [[GovernmentConspiracy to send ready-written fake letters to several abandoned families of killed border-crossers]], in order to maintain a [[LockedOutOfTheLoop masquerade that their dead relatives had made it over there and were just fine]].]]
49	* RoadTripPlot
50	* STDImmunity: Played with. When Amber (the blonde one of the two chicks in Tennessee) refuses to have unprotected sex with him when condoms aren't available, low-brow Tom tries to talk her into it stating that he cannot have HIV/AIDS as he's from the East and that they didn't have it there. [[note]]The major wave may have been mostly halted by the Iron Curtain for some time, but the virus still got through. The GDR was completely aware of this and managed it rather well.[[/note]] His suggestion of oral sex instead is rejected with awe.
51	* StrangerSafety: Sure, Tom and Veit are just two low-brow foreign tourists who are unlikely to harm Zoe who gave them shelter. But the biker trusting two random guys [[WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief to drive his brother's car right across the US]]?
52	* TitleDrop
53	* VeryLooselyBasedOnATrueStory: Subverted. It's lampshaded as the subtitle is "The first ''Ossis'' (Easterners) in America... based on an almost true story", but the journey really happened and [[WordOfGod the making-of film]] even shows interviews with the real-life Tom Zickler whose story the movie is based on.
54	* WhereEverybodyKnowsYourFlame: Veit and Tom strip as East German soldiers at the "Black Mustang" in UsefulNotes/LasVegas to earn money for Tom's dentistry.
55	* WhyWeAreBummedCommunismFell: The entire reason for the trip.
56	* YouNoTakeCandle: Played straight first, but they get better.
57	** Also inverted in the supermarket scene in New Mexico:
58	--> '''Tom:''' Who's supposed to understand us? Have you ever encountered anybody here in America speaking something else but American? Look at that... ''(watching a local girl)'' yeah, my friend would like to marry you and then just eat and eat like you until he gets just as round and polly! ''(local girl laughs)'' There she laughs!
59	** This is later subverted with Zoe, a [[ButNotTooForeign half-German girl]] understanding every word of Tom's would-you-go-to-bed-with-me question. She later gives them shelter and follows them to UsefulNotes/LasVegas.
60	** Also featured in the BigShutUp in UsefulNotes/LasVegas.
61	* YoureInsane: Tom's parents are very resistant to the idea of their journey. His mother just argues "you even cannot speak English!", while his father says outright that "This is total crap!"

Context Film / Friendship