This film provides relief from heated debates

It lies there like a bead of chlorinated sweat, the bright blue pool. Framed by a meadow over which large, small, heavy, light, burnt, tanned, pale, half-naked and veiled bodies drag themselves. The smell of fries in your nose, the splashing and squealing of children in your ears. They all have their reasons for being here: to swim, to sunbathe, to eat. To escape the loneliness, the muggy rented apartment, the men.

It's hot in the women's bathroom. Also because this is where the formative conflicts of the present are fought out. Economic (who can afford air conditioning or a pool?) and ecological (are climate change becoming unbearable?) issues loom in the background, while those of gender and national identity come to the fore. The fact that men only appear marginally in Germany's only women's pool is no reason to lose sight of feminist concerns. On the contrary. It is precisely here that they can be enjoyed in such a concentrated form as a fresh limoncello. What can and should a woman wear? When is a woman beautiful? And who counts as a woman anyway?

With "Freibad", Doris Dörrie (director and screenplay, the latter together with Karin Kaçi and Madeleine Fricke) succeeds in creating an amusing and extreme portrait of society that lets all prejudices go swimming. One of the main conflicts unfolds between best friends Eva (Andrea Sawatzki) and Gabi (Maria Happel). They want to sunbathe undisturbed. Eva used to be a singer and sex bomb, Gabi secretly smuggles her pug into the bathroom in a stroller. Now both are fighting to stay under 60 for as long as possible.

In their emancipated self-image, they feel particularly disturbed by a group of burkini-wearing women. Not only do they give them the feeling that their bikinis are not appropriate, they also gradually drive up the admission prices for the outdoor pool and finally cause lamb sausages to suddenly appear on the kiosk menu instead of pork.

When the girlfriends, who have nothing else but their bath, are driven from their regular place under the mushroom umbrella like polar bears from their floe, their collars burst. In protest, they now swim topless and expose their feminist breasts to anyone who doesn't want to see them. The lifeguard (Melodie Wakiyuamina), who has to take the rap out of the argument, counters with Ageism: nobody wants to see something that old, it's disgusting.

Perhaps revenge for the fact that the girlfriends had just described the body of a guest (Julia Jendrossek) as "jelly pudding". This in turn leaves deep cracks in the self-confidence of the young woman, who repeatedly fails in her mission to win the favor of Yasemin (Nilam Farooq), an amateur competitive swimmer. Undaunted, she spreads out her towel next to her day after day; she either doesn't seem to have heard anything about minimum distance or she believes in the love-enhancing power of transgressions.

She dresses up with bright blue dyed armpit hair and a brand new bikini. But Yasemin only has eyes for the lanes she stubbornly pulls while her liberal Turkish mother shakes her head at her full-body veil. Their extended family is also in the bathroom, but more for barbecuing in the meadow than for swimming. It's just as illegal as smuggling a 13-year-old boy into the women's pool or jumping off the edge of the pool. "Freibad" is like a hidden object that you only have to stare at long enough for a web of structural and individual injuries to stare back.

The drop that finally causes the pool to overflow is a turd. In the middle of the water. The question of guilt provokes a ludicrous ping-pong of accusations that criss-crosses accusations of cultural appropriation, racism, and reverse racism. The arbitrariness with which "Racist!" can be slammed at those who suspect a Muslim boy, those who defend the boys, those who sell Halal food, those who don't, and those who suspect a Muslim boy are all slapstick -Comedy and skilfully pokes fun at the culture of argument that is common in many circles today.

There is screaming, pushing, beating. There is only peace in the evening hours. Hanno Lentz' camera captures the silence that then spreads over the pool in wondrously poetic images. When the employees after work float on the waveless water under the starry sky in midsummer, the spectators can also take a deep breath. Before everything starts all over again the next morning.

And the hen fights escalate to such an extent that the lifeguard throws in the towel. But because an outdoor pool cannot exist without a lifeguard, a new one is needed. And because the only qualified applicant is a man who announces "I'm post-gender" and who likes to wear a mermaid fin as an aquatic nature, but looks more masculine than the queer kiosk owner, all hell breaks loose the next day.

One of the film's strengths is that the film charges some conflicts with identity politics, but calmly lets other obvious opportunities pass by. The fully veiled newcomers, for example, turn out to be refugees from Switzerland – since the burqa ban they have not been able to leave the house there – which repeatedly contributes to the comedy of the situation, while the fact that the Swiss lifeguard is black is not mentioned. "Freibad" is set in Germany, American debates are not naively transported out of their context and slapped at this country. Rather, it is about the specific conflicts between German Turks and Arabs or between 1968 feminism and Islamic feminism.

In her complex, multidimensional depiction of diversity, Dörrie avoids the typical pitfalls of schematism. Which couples end up finding each other is refreshing with astonishing unconventionality. Only at the final roll call, which is obligatory in German comedies and which the sausage seller holds and calls for community and tolerance in pathetic rhetoric, does one prefer to listen. Also, some punchlines are turned too obsessively on the Islam cover-up drama.

But overall, Dörrie delivers a cleverly exaggerated bathing fun. A film for anyone looking to cool down from heated debates, possibly even in an air-conditioned cinema.