The goalkeeper Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss) is sent off after committing a foul during an away game. This causes him to completely lose his bearings. He wanders aimlessly through the unfamiliar town, spends the night with the box-office attendant of a movie theater (Erika Pluhar), and strangles her the next morning. But instead of turning himself in or fleeing, Bloch then goes to his ex-girlfriend’s (Kai Fischer) place in the country and passively waits there for the police to come and arrest him.
As Wenders himself has stated, the visual idiom of Hitchcock’s films provided the model for his debut film. He adheres minutely to the thoroughly “cinematic” source, a novella by Peter Handke. With his cameraman Robby Müller and his cutter Peter Przygodda—both of whom had already worked with him on his film thesis at the HFF (Munich University of Television and Film)—in THE GOALIE’S ANXIETY, he set forth a collaboration that would weld this team together for years.
“His technique of using images to keep the plot intact makes THE GOALIE’S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK a milestone in young German cinema.”—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
