“Don't be yourself. Be pleasant.” The smile is part of the work uniform, just like the grotesquely short purple dress in the cold exhibition hall and the uncomfortable stilettos that dress the hostesses' bodies. One of them is Brigitte (Johanna Wokalek), whose frozen smile is repeatedly praised as exemplary by her tough boss. However, Brigitte is significantly older than her young colleagues – and she feels that her future is slowly running out. Because the day will come, also in Caroline Kox's film adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel “The Lovers” from 1975, when the female face and the female body lose their market value.
In this respect, Brigitte is concerned with existential questions. Can she save herself into a marriage in time before it is too late for that too? “Rich, but also disgusting,” is how she finds the object of her efforts, the wealthy mother’s boy Heinz (Ben Münchow), who is bullied by the alpha males in his professional environment. But does that really make a difference given the rapidly dwindling number of alternatives left to choose from for the indebted and more or less homeless Brigitte? A beautiful villa and a new sofa set, but you can accept one or two dreary handjobs in the bathroom, right?
For Brigitte (Johanna Wokalek) at the end of her hostess cycle it's all about survival.
You will hardly find a more merciless chronicler of the sexual-economic upheavals between men and women than the Austrian Nobel Prize winner for literature Elfriede Jelinek. Nevertheless, her novel “The Lovers” is now half a century old, and when it is transferred from the Austrian countryside of 1975 to the present day of the digital age, it undoubtedly has to undergo some transformations. Director Caroline Kox, who works under the stage name “Koxi”, is also aware of this – and so the transfer into the business world rhythmed by Insta videos works quite well for a long time.
There is a lot of potential for things to go wrong here: the business language of the patriarchal world of managers has often been seen distorted into a caricature, as has the toxic masculinity of its protagonists. Sleazy pick-up lines in professional situations, uninvited hands on bottoms, the entire repertoire is presented here. And not only that, but also self-optimizing TED talks, web videos between Instagram and OnlyFans and, in the end, the reality TV hell of private television – none of this gets away unscathed.
Let the laughter get stuck in your throat
None of this seems new to you, and in combination with the grotesque, over-the-top performance theater character of the production, “Lovers” has a lot of potential to really get on your nerves. But fortunately it only very rarely actually comes to this. The film is carried above all by a decent verve in Kox's direction, which at the same time brings a certain joy of nonsense to the material. Some episodes of her film are therefore funny – even if, when viewed as a whole, the laughter can definitely get stuck in your throat.
And upon closer inspection, some things in “Lovers” turn out to be more complex than the caricature-like drawing of the male protagonists in particular suggests. Jelinek's original is also explicitly about the competitive conditions into which the eponymous women are forced. And Kox's film adaptation repeatedly focuses on the rifts between the different generations. There is Brigitte, whose time in the hostess job is soon coming to an end. And there are her young colleagues who chat behind the scenes about solidarity and strikes over champagne and can't yet understand that for Brigitte, this humiliating shitty job is about her existence.
Paula (Hannah Schiller) wants to make it as an influencer, but only manages to get by with hostess jobs.
In the middle of it all is the young influencer Paula (Hannah Schiller), who dreams of becoming famous and ends up stranded in the exhibition hall. And Brigitte's mother Angelika (Susanne Bredehöft), who “made it” economically into a wealthy marriage, but had to give up her complete autonomy to do so – and the poison of this hopeless attitude to life is now injecting into her daughter's veins. Finally, the crowning glory is the alpha business woman who serves up banal motivational sayings in expensive TED talks and thus converts the suffering of others into profit.
There is a short and particularly beautiful moment that sticks in the memory and perhaps even takes “lovers” to a new level. It takes place pretty much towards the end, and together with Brigitte we catch Heinz discussing his own insecurities on the laptop screen in a Zoom call with a few other dudes from a kind of men's group. Here, all the entanglements of the harshly caricatured gender war unfold in a different way, and it becomes visible that basically everyone experiences their punishment in this merciless system. As perpetrator and victim alike.
Conclusion: Caroline Kox's film adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's merciless analysis of gender wars occasionally oversteps the mark in its caricature, but at least in parts it convinces with a production full of verve, speed and a malicious joke that by no means softens the darkness of the material, but rather gives it an even stronger edge.
We saw “Lovers” at the Berlinale 2026, where it celebrated its world premiere in the Forum section.