IT makes for uncomfortable viewing: a grave-faced young man pockets bottles of booze, gets beat up, and sleeps rough in squalid toilets with a sheet of newspaper for a pillow. Though he dosses down with a community of homeless people, Hagen Trinker (Jürgen Vogel, the hangdog butcher in "Life Is All You Get") seems different from the average comatose "beer corpse". Behind his hard, immensely woeful expression lies the implication that he's just a "hobby bum", that this policeman's son has deliberately opted for a life without a fixed abode. "I need the open sky otherwise I get depressed," explains a fellow streetperson who amasses odds and ends of furniture to feather the nest of the destitute prostitute he's in love with.

Hagen and his off-balance cohort form part of a cast of ragtag characters who scrounge money at train stations, make soup with a bone just gnawed by their dog and check returned-coin slots for stray pfennigs. But when 15-year-old runaway Judith (Julia Filimonow) joins their ranks, the men's interest is piqued - sex naturally being chief among their preoccupations. It's the impenetrable Hagen who is the most seduced despite himself, despite his drive to live on the abyss and drink himself numb.

Though it's set against a terminally dismal landscape, "Fat World" somehow isn't all-out brutal enough, and the hostile characters aren't revelatory enough, to strike a poignant chord - several too-neat coincidences also see to that. Hagen has an amazingly pathos-intimating face and he seems to undergo some sort of journey in his feelings for Judith, but because the man has no discernible past and doesn't evince much in the present, it seems pointless to wonder about his future. As he remarks, "Nothing matters." What "Fat World" has to offer is a chronicle of the unspeakable hardship of sub-subsistence streetlife told from the vantage of people who are far from living off the fat of the land.