Review: Streaker đź‘Ž
Take a misfit teacher, a small Swiss town, football, a stupid snap decision, bad luck, a really desperate idea, mix everything together and you get: Streaker [IMDb, Trailer (YouTube, German)], or “Flitzer” in German.
Balz Näf (Beat Schlatter) is a middle-aged teacher, who somehow managed to estrange himself from everyone around him, including his teenage daughter, who pretends not to know him at school. His only passion in life is a dead an almost forgotten local author, whom he reveres. He is in charge of doing the finances for his school and over three years he has managed to put enough money aside to open a museum dedicated to his idol. When the director and remaining staff realize how much money suddenly is available, they become very interested, but vote— not caring at all about his dream — to invest it in a FIFA-certified green for the school’s football field.
Mr. Näf feels betrayed and in his ire decides to take his barber up on an offer to participate in some sports betting. In the hopes of multiplying the money, he bets all of it and — of course — loses everything. Suddenly he finds himself in the uncomfortable situation that the construction manager of the museum, who is always accompanied by a threatening thug, is waiting for the payments. And if school director gets wind of what he did with the school’s money, he would no longer have a job.
In his desperation he turns back to his barber trying to bet on more football matches to win the money back. He has, however, no more contacts left to bribe and is unable to set up a new opportunity to bet safely. At this point Mr. Näf remembers that towards the end of the fateful match that lost him all the money, a streaker interrupted the game. A new idea forms in his head: He convinces his barber to set up a new bet, but instead of focusing on the score, this time the appearance of the streaker should be the focus. By breaking into the streaker’s home Mr. Näf figures out where he plans to strike next.
This arrangement works for a while, the barber’s customers go wild for this new, exciting bet and and Mr. Näf actually gets a good share of the revenue. When he drives over to spy on the streaker’s newest plans, he sees him being dragged off by the police. In order to keep the betting going, he starts looking for other streakers and even approaches random naked people to ask them, if they would be interested to help out. The only person, who agrees to his ridiculous proposal, is an unemployed guy.
From now on Mr. Näf leads a double life. While keeping up appearances as respectable — but unpopular — teacher, he also builds up his own “criminal” organisation of streakers. He sets up a training center in a barn and starts educating his candidates in strategy and training them for stamina and speed. As more and more matches are disrupted by nude people running across the field, the football association calls for the police to put a stop to it. A new anti-crime unit is set up with the sole focus of bringing down the organized streaking.
Well, I think this summary of the movie’s story kind of speaks volumes. You are right to think that this sounds absolutely ridiculous. It really is. To be fair, I laughed several times during the movie, but it wasn’t necessarily because it was funny. I rather wondered how I ended up watching something so absurd on a big cinema screen for 90 minutes rather than in a silly 10 minute YouTube video. To top it all off, the entire movie is in Schwyzerdütsch — Swiss German — with German subtitles, so unless you can understand it well, the reading keeps your brain way more active than it should be during a movie like this, which makes it worse.
In my opinion, it is the perfect choice for a bad movie night. Otherwise I must recommend to give it a wide berth. If you really want to go for a movie in a German dialect, I can somewhat recommend the Bavarian movie Grave Decisions (“Wer früher stirbt, ist länger tot”) [IMDb] from 2006, which is absurd in a better way.
