29 years old and lonesome Fanny Fink is like the cool, death-exploring, ten years older sister of Amélie Poulain which begs to wonder why Nobody Loves Me is (nowadays) quite literally loved by nobody and has become practically unknown while Amélie gets much more love than she could ever handle. (Some stats: Letterboxd: 148 views to 154.000; IMDb: 1.058 ratings to 631.513; MUBI: 101 ratings to 28.311)
Yes, it’s a very American German film. Failing to copy Hollywood blockbusters is something that German films have been doing for a waaay too long time and never has it not been ridiculously embarrassing. But Nobody Loves Me is not an attempt to imitate, it just shows the visual and thematic influence of American cinema – and not in a bad way. While it seems somewhat ridiculous when the Plattenbau somewhere in Cologne resembles what you’d see in 80s films of New York or any other big American city, it’s actually not that far-fetched. I’ve been hanging around such housings myself during the 90s and they did in fact stand in what you’d call bad neighbourhoods and they were run down and smelly and probably they still are. I remember the 90s German city being quite brown and grey and fairly lifeless; my friends and I were hanging around on parking lots and playgrounds all the time and in my memory the trees are always leafless. Much has changed since then. Gentrification also brought colours and lights. In Nobody Loves Me, gentrification is one of the tackled topics. Like poverty, homosexuality, racism. But also being a single woman on the verge of turning 30, being betrayed by your best friend and being mortal. All that woven into the most German time of the year in the area around Cologne: Karneval.
The best thing about Nobody Loves Me are the atmospheric sequences of birds flying around the Plattenbau, people with Migrationshintergrund going about their day (it’s 1994 and my parents and I have only a permission to reside in Germany at that time and haven’t become German citizens yet; it was only recently that I found out that, in fact, I also have the Ukrainian citizenship), workers leaving home at dawn.
The worst thing is that Fanny’s personal dating and mating problems overshadow everything. They swallow up the time of the more interesting story-lines and Fanny herself suffocates those around her. What remains is a film that exploits all the mentioned topics and quirky characters more than examining them and their situation. Fanny is well off, she wouldn’t have to live in such housing, probably not even with today’s ridiculous rents. 
So you could argue that at the end, she gets what she deserves from Orfeo, for being so self-absorbed and ignorant but she’s so well off, that she’s not even bothered by it. More so, she’s probably even quite content that her https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro has taken on an airy form and she wouldn’t have to deal with all the weight of a real person anymore. I think it’s a generational thing, but Dörrie’s films seem to have a quite questionable approach to other cultures. But still, it’s interesting to see what was possible in a German film in 1994.
Fanny’s exploration of death seems to exist only on the surface as well. She takes classes where participants build their own coffins and make their own tombstones, where they try on plastic bags on their heads and experience a burial in their hand-made coffins. Fanny wears skeleton prints and skeleton earrings and her engagement with death seems to be more of a pastime to cure her boredom than an actual engagement with an essential topic. And when, at the end, she throws her coffin from her balcony, it seems like one could actually make a decision against death or against dealing with it and one’s mortality. Keeping only the skeleton prints and choosing life like keeping only her fantasy version of Orfeo instead of the actual person.
But if you too are looking for a fun but also interesting approach to death, go and Ask A Mortician. I don’t know if it is actually helpful with coming to terms with mortality or the fear of the actual act of dying, but it’s historically and culturaly interesting. A topic that Caitlin Doughty hasn’t tackled yet are catacomb saints. Catacomb saints are skeletons of alleged martyrs from Roman catacombs (and should not be confused with the catacomb saints of the orthodox Catacomb Church in the Soviet Union). They were richly and beautifully decorated by nuns, given the name of a saint and displayed for worshipping in churches. Even if you’re not religious or a believer in saints, it’s not difficult to bedazzled by them and to appreciate the art and craft that went into their making. 
It’s already at the beginning of Nobody Loves Me, where we see Fanny casually talking to one of those saints as if it were a friend or a therapist. Sparked by excitement that there might be a catacomb saint somewhere in or around Cologne I tried to find out where it could be exactly but haven’t been successful; at least I could find out that it’s highly unlikely that it resides in the Cologne area.
KINOXIKON 