Fridae

If you think about it, romantic comedies come in two mutually exclusive flavours: you can have the wildly improbable meeting and eventual union of the opposites or you can have the wildly mismatched couple whose approach to marriage (or in this days, cohabitation) seems to be that of a war that is only interrupted by coitus.

Taken together, both Keinohrhasen and Zweiohrküken are a rare example that plays both sides of the fence. In the first film, the comedy centred on a romcom couple who hate each other’s guts so much, it seems surprising that they eventually end up with each other – despite the script contrivances piling on. In the sequel, we are reminded of just how improbable and contrived the first movie was because here they are, a couple who can’t stand each other (for exactly the same reasons they hated each other in the first film!) and who are on the verge of breaking up.

I suppose there might have been an off chance that the first romcom was just an elaborate set-up for a sequel that would actually deconstruct and subvert the entire romcom genre just from the sheer irony of its premise. That’s not what the creators of this film had in mind, though. The comic premise in the film is the generic and timeless idea that marriage is a war of the sexes continued in the bedroom – complete with the deliberate stoking of mutual jealousies, flirtations with exes, habitual lies, invasion of privacy, and so on.

If you’ve watched (and loved) the first film, you might be shocked that aside from the names of the characters and the stars playing them, the sequel has very little in common with the previous movie. As it is written, Rabbit Without Ears 2 is a standalone film that does not possess the qualities that made the first film compelling.

And that may not necessarily be a bad thing altogether. The film functions as a grab bag of raunchy comic sketches – some of which I suspect wouldn’t have seen the light of day if the film’s creators had written a more cohesive script.