Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

This movie was very fragmented and disjointed. Dorothee had very little appeal to me, as I was unable to connect to her character. Much of the script did not match with the video, and there were too many jumps in the story. I was extremely thrown off when, unexpectedly, one of the characters began speaking in Spanish, switching suddenly back to German. I was unable to attach myself to the movie, and when the plot finally began to take off (once Dorothee was in the United States), the movie ended with very little explanation. Agreeing with the previous person posting a review, perhaps I would have enjoyed the film more if I understood German. It was obvious that much of the script was not translated into the subtitles.

1st watched 8/18/2003 - 4 out of 10(Dir-Monika Treut): Interesting first half, but boring second half in this German drama that is initially about the search for romantic love but ends up being about a `physical' lesbian relationship that, in my opinion, doesn't answer any questions that the character poses in the first half. The movie starts with a reporter who is writing an article on romantic love that is very detailed about sexual reproduction and the intent of all of us(men & women) to return to the womb. This part of the movie was compelling as we listened to this reporters' profound thought-processes on the subject but as soon as she takes a trip to California to look for her mother her research becomes a lot more personal and leans towards an obsession with a stripper and the research pretty-much gets trashed. I guess the thing that bothered me the most was how one-sided the film was. The men portrayed in the movie were overweight, brainless sex-addicts and the women were smart social beings who were attractive because of these qualities. This is one filmmakers perspective of life, but she doesn't answer her initial questions and instead concludes that `fun' is the answer. This, in my opinion, is no different than what a man's conclusion would be as well.

Primarily I wonder where the title Virgin Machine came from. Is it a German thing? Was it for attracting audiences? Maybe it carried some hidden relevance to the content of the film -but I suspect that this movie never contained any pattern or code. I see it as just a mixed up sequence of events that don't mean anything at all, but might entertain the right audience just the same. Dorothee, the main character is certainly no innocent. She is investigating romantic love and the monologues especially express her somewhat rough view of what love is (fetuses, feminism, amphetamines). She dumps her overweight, fellow journalist boyfriend, to begin an incestuous relationship with her half-brother. Then her mother calls her to San Francisco. This marks a change in the film atmosphere and the real beginning of the story (it happens quite early on). The remainder of the film concentrates on Dorothees time in San Francisco -although she never does meet the mother who she came there for. Almost immediately after arrival she finds herself explicitly wound up in the lesbian sex scene. She is introduced to a breifcase full of dildoes by a geeky looking woman named Suzy Sexpert. She befreinds a porn business receptionist. She falls for a sex therapist who dances for an all-female crowd dressed in a suit and moustach. The film does succeed in a puzzling portrayal of different types and definitions of love.For example, when Dorothee finds out the woman she has 'fallen in love with' is the trick-baby handing her the bill she laughs heartily. No pain is shown (which is surely unwise for a film about the search for love). It makes me wonder what Monika Treut set out to do by making this movie. In the end Dorothee abandons her dreams of romantic love to take a job in San Fran as a lesbian stripper. Also, at the risk of sounding pase, the dykey strip scene was incredibly crude and distasteful, and the woman who did it was a terrible actress (either way she dressed). It's almost cult really. And I got the impression that the english translations were quite incomplete, so, had I understood German, it might not have seemed so bad.