Friendship! is a 2010 German coming-of-age film directed by Markus Goller and starring Friedrich Mücke and Matthias Schweighöfer.
The Berlin Wall fell and two lifelong friends from East Germany, Veit (Mücke) and Tom (Schweighöfer), want to travel to San Francisco, the former in order to find his father, whose only life sign since fleeing East Germany 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.
This film provides examples of:
- The Alleged Car: Veit fantasizes about watching a Trabant driving down the Golden Gate Bridge and the fantasy becomes reality in the end.
- All Germans Are Nazis: Default mode of the passport-checking policeman at JFK airport.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking
- Veit: Dancing? OK. Undressing myself, sure. At a gay strip club, I don't mind. But not to the anthem of the GDR!
- Artistic License – Geography: Veit says that San Francisco is "the westernmost point of the world..."
- Badass Biker: They meet some in Tennessee and one of them even trusts them to drive his brother's car back to California.
- Berserk Button: Never tell Veit that your father was a Communist, even if you're a drunk American biker who lost his father in Vietnam.
- Bittersweet Ending: So Troperiffic that it's a mere technicality: The Reveal in Frisco makes Veit suffer a Heroic BSoD, but the Heterosexual Life-Partners reconcile from the Love Triangle and they see The Alleged Car crossing Golden Gate.
- Black Boss Lady: The black policewoman who arrests Veit and Tom. May be just a low-ranking cop on patrol duty, but can definitely act quite authoritatively.
- But Not Too Foreign: Zoe.
- Cluster F-Bomb: Invoked and discussed at a diner in Tennessee.
- Cool Car: Brought back to you from your biking brother at the other end of the country by entrusting it to two foreign road trippers.
- Dead All Along: Veit's father
- Dirty Communists: Whenever they try to explain which part of Germany they come from, they often end up describing themselves like this, often with inconvenient consequences.
- The Ditz: Tom, at times.
- Drugs Are Bad: Or whatever. Is there a trope out there to describe a car driver smoking weed from an apple bong?
- Eagleland: Both flavors, including:
- Big Apple Sauce: where they land at first.
- Fly Over Country: which they have to cross.
- Viva Las Vegas!: where much of the real action happens.
- San Francisco: which is their final destination.
- Expy: The first driver who picks them up as hitchhikers is a clear embodiment of John Kricfalusi and the drawings in his car also clearly resemble The Ren & Stimpy Show cartoons.
- Fish out of Water
- Flashback: Tom and Veit getting to know each other as schoolchildren and stretching aerials to receive Western radio.
- From a Certain Point of View: 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 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 his father was in fact dead all along, but Veit couldn't know that.
- Government Conspiracy: The real story behind the postcards.
- HA HA HA—No
- Heroic BSoD: Veit after the revelation.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: After all, the movie is also about true friendship!
- Tom: From then on, Veit became my twenty-four!
- Locked Out of the Loop: Veit is a culprit and a victim of this. Veit forces his own point of view on Tom when it comes to explaining his father's absence. And the Stasi forced their own point of view on Veit's family.
- Love Triangle: 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.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: 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.
- 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 the explanation above.
- On the Money: They show some creativity in earning money on their trip.
- Parental Abandonment: Veit's father.
- Politically Correct History: Averted. As the movie is set in 1990, New York City is correctly depicted with the Twin Towers.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Having grown up behind the Iron Curtain, Veit and Tom didn't know Star Wars before Zoe tells them about it.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Tom is red, Veit is blue.
- The Reveal: Veit's father was actually killed at the Berlin Wall. The birthday postcards were sent by another emigrant who made a deal with the Stasi who allowed him to go west if he agreed to send ready-written fake letters to several abandoned families of killed border-crossers, in order to maintain a masquerade that their dead relatives had made it over there and were just fine.
- Road Trip Plot
- STD Immunity: 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 His suggestion of oral sex instead is rejected with awe.
- Stranger Safety: 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 to drive his brother's car right across the US?
- Title Drop
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: 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
the making-of film even shows interviews with the real-life Tom Zickler whose story the movie is based on. - Where Everybody Knows Your Flame: Veit and Tom strip as East German soldiers at the "Black Mustang" in Las Vegas to earn money for Tom's dentistry.
- Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell: The entire reason for the trip.
- You No Take Candle: Played straight first, but they get better.
- Also inverted in the supermarket scene in New Mexico:
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!- This is later subverted with Zoe, a 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 Las Vegas.
- Also featured in the Big "SHUT UP!" in Las Vegas.
- You're Insane!: 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!"
