Christiane F. —Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981)

(YouTube Streaming, November 2022) I don’t often watch movies without subtitles in languages that I can’t understand, but Christiane F. —Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo presented a special case: It was the remaining pick in one of my list of must-see movies, and it was impossible to locate a version with English subtitles or dubbing. So… I treated it like opera. I grabbed the programme (in this case, the film’s Wikipedia entry), thoroughly absorbed the plot and then watched it without obsessing about understanding the dialogue. Surprisingly, it worked… but then again, Christiane F. has a very specific appeal. The story of a young teenager falling through the drug-filled netherworld of late-1970s Berlin, Christiane F. becomes this near-hallucinatory accumulation of grime, filth and decay. The portrait of nighttime Berlin feels proto-cyberpunk, as its leads fall lower and lower in search of a score, and come to exist solely when the sun is out. For many viewers, the film will have another significant appeal: it features none other than David Bowie as an object of fascination by the heroine (through a soundtrack dominated by Bowie songs) and then with a concert sequence in which Bowie plays himself. Given all of this, I could understand (without understanding much German) how, plot-wise, there isn’t anything here that we haven’t seen in other sad stories of teenage drug addiction: from a dull middle-class existence to living in flop-houses, soliciting strangers for sex and seeing friends die with needles in their arms. It’s all adapted from a true story that becomes even more fascinating after the film’s release, as the real Christiane F. never quite became clean, and (as of 2013) was unrepentant about it. Still, back to the movie—it’s still remarkably effective on a visual and atmospheric level. It’s probably less hard-hitting now than it was about its subject matter, but that’s really the viewers’ fault for getting jaded about teenage drug addiction. No matter the language, Christiane F. still speaks clearly about it.