The Berlin Affair (Italian: Interno Berlinese; German: Leidenschaften) is a 1985 Italo-German film, directed by Liliana Cavani and starring Gudrun Landgrebe, Kevin McNally and Mio Takaki.

[1] Set in Berlin, 1938, it sees the wife of a rising Nazi diplomat fall in love with Mitsuko Matsugae, the daughter of the Japanese ambassador and an artist.

Berlin, Nazi Germany, late 1938: Louise von Hollendorf visits her former college literature professor to tell him about her recent life events.

Several months earlier during the spring season, Louise is married to Heinz, a German senior diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

At the institute, Louise meets a classmate named Mitsuko Matsugae, the young and alluring daughter of the Japanese ambassador.

Disgusted and disillusioned, Louise breaks away from Mitsuko and returns to her husband, confessing the full extent of what has happened.

At the visit, Wolf exposes von Heiden's relationship, ruining the general's career and forcing him to flee both Berlin and Germany.

By now, their self-destructive relationship becomes publicly known to the Nazi regime as the exiled Benno gets his account published in a Berlin newspaper.

However, rather than leave each other, all three drink poison prepared by Mitsuko in a ceremonial rite of suicide and lay down in the room's bed holding onto each other.

Cavani was drawn to the novel because of its dramatic intensity and extreme economy, his capacity to bring us, as nearly breathless spectators, inside the meaning of seemingly insignificant details.

Sonoko, the first-person narrator, recounts her own story to a prominent writer as a long monologue that continues the novel itself.

[2] It is the story of a passionate love affair with Mitsuko that eventually involves her husband and Watanuki, an impotent effeminate dandy.

Gudrun Landgrabe, one of the discoveries of the New German Cinema, had appeared in Robert van Ackeren's A Woman in Flames 1982, Edgar Reitz’s Heimat 1984, and István Szabó’s Colonel Redl 1985.