| Cover Art |
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| Credits |
Director: Uli Edel
Starring: Natja Brunckhorst, Thomas Haustein, Jens Kuphal, Reiner Wolk, Kerstin Richter
Screenplay: Herman Weigel
Music: Jurgen Knieper, David Bowie
Country: Germany
AKA: Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo; We Children from Bahnhof Zoo |
German director Uli Edel (Last Exit
to Brooklyn, Body of Evidence)
made his startling cinematic debut in 1981 with Christiane F., the harrowing
true story of a young girl who became part of
Berlin's drug scene at age 13, and by 14,
a heroin addict and prostitute. The movie is based
on a book adapted from many hours of recorded
conversation with Christiane Felscherinow (Christiane
F.: We Children from Bahnhof Zoo), which
upon its release in 1978, instantly became a European
bestseller, soon appearing in English-speaking
countries under the title H – The
Autobiography of a Child Prostitute and Heroin
Addict.
The film begins with Christiane (Natja Brunckhorst),
a strikingly pretty teenager, wandering down the
corridor of a dismal high-rise apartment building,
where she lives with her divorced mother and younger
sister Sabine. Lonely, bored and alienated, she
decides to go along with a schoolfriend to Sound,
a nightclub that has recently opened in the city.
Here Christiane finds a sense of belonging and
freedom which her life has been so far devoid
of. Drugs are commonplace in her new environment,
and wanting to fit in with her new group of friends,
she begins to take LSD and valium.
Christiane becomes even more disconnected from
her home life when Sabine moves out to live with
their father, and her mother is spending more
time at work and with her partner Klaus, whom
Christiane dislikes. She visits Sound frequently,
where she meets her new boyfriend Detlef, a heroin
addict. Wanting to keep up with him, she begins
snorting the narcotic, then, on her 14th birthday,
starts shooting up. Christiane discovers that
Detlef is forced to finance his habit by hustling
at Bahnhof Zoo station, an infamous meeting place
for dealers, streetwalkers and kerb-crawlers.
Soon hooked on heroin, Christiane has no choice
herself but to join his seedy world of prostitution,
signaling the beginning of a shocking downward
spiral…
Christiane F. is an incredibly
powerful, disturbing movie. The fact that it is
based on real-life events makes it all the more
unforgettable. It is also one of the most unremittingly
grim portraits of drug addiction ever filmed.
Edel spares us nothing in his close-ups of bruised
veins, blunt needles, vomit and squalor and dirty
syringes plunging into necks and arms. His strong
use of drab, washed out colours, adds to the feeling
of despair and hopelessness. To add to the realism,
some shots of young addicts gathered at the Bahnhof
Zoo station were filmed with a hidden camera,
and are almost indistinguishable from those parts
of the story that are staged. For his actors,
Edel enlisted mostly nonprofessionals: "The
cast was so natural you'd think they had
been either actors or junkies all their lives.
The fact is that not one of them had any stage
experience whatsoever and only one had ever had
any experience with heroin." In light of
that, the verisimilitude he achieves is remarkable.
Thanks to the authenticity of his players, Edel
is able to simulate the world of Berlin's
teenage street addicts, circa mid 1970s, in sharply
convincing detail. The actors also bear a strong
resemblance to the real-life characters they are
portraying. The then 14-year-old Natja Brunckhorst's
performance in particular, is phenomenal.
Upon its release, Christiane F. became the highest-grossing film in German cinema
history, stunning Cannes Festival audiences and
appearing on many 'Top Ten Foreign Film'
lists. It naturally caused controversy amongst
Australian censors, sparking a debate over whether
the movie should have received an M rating, so
children could see it as a warning against drugs,
or an R rating, in case the film was seen as an
incitement to take drugs. It was eventually released
with an R rating in 1982. |
