Melissa Anderson
Drugs, desperation, degradation, David Bowie: Uli Edel’s 1981 cult film portrays the downward spiral of a young girl who falls in with teenage street addicts in West Berlin.
Natja Brunckhorst as Christiane in Christiane F. Courtesy Janus Films.
Christiane F., directed by Uli Edel,
now playing at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City
• • •
American TV and cinema of the 1970s and early ’80s abounds with degraded, imperiled, sex-peddled, and addicted adolescent heroines. An adaptation of the 1971 publishing blockbuster Go Ask Alice, about a teenage girl spiraling deep into substance abuse, aired as an ABC Movie of the Week in 1973. Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields each played a pimped-out twelve-year-old in, respectively, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby (1978). In Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), a once-dutiful daughter rebels against her Calvinist father and ends up performing in porn and live-sex shows. The only child of two pathologically unfit parents, the high schooler portrayed by Linda Manz in Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue (1980) spends her days and nights in an anomic stupor, barely escaping predators.
This era-specific, abject sorority wasn’t limited to just the States, however. Among the most popular films in West Germany in 1981 and long a cult object in the US, Christiane F. recounts how the thirteen-year-old eponymous Berliner descends into heroin addiction and sex work to support her habit. Directed by Uli Edel, the movie is rooted in grim fact. It is based on the life of Christiane Felscherinow, born in 1962, whose lengthy interviews about her drug use and prostitution—and those of her fellow teenage addicts, who congregated and hustled at Berlin’s Bahnhof Zoo, a grotty railway hub—with two reporters from the magazine Stern became the 1979 book We Children from Bahnhof Zoo.
Jens Kuphal as Axel and Thomas Haustein as Detlev in Christiane F. Courtesy Janus Films.
Edel’s movie wastes no time bringing us down into the muck. “Piss and shit all over the place; just take a good look at it” are the first words we hear: the off-screen narration of Christiane, played by Natja Brunckhorst, whose dour baby face fills the frame as she stares directly into the camera. Here in her screen debut, Brunckhorst turned fourteen during the shoot; nearly all of her castmates were schoolkids with no training in acting who would make no more movies after this one. Their still-developing bodies and untutored performance styles lend Christiane F. an unalloyed rawness that augments its sordidness and despair.
Christiane Reichelt as Babsi in Christiane F. Courtesy Janus Films.
Christiane’s trajectory to hell begins with typical teenage disaffection. Bored with her life with her divorced mother in the apartment they share in a decrepit high-rise tower, she starts to hang out at Sound, a hot new club. An innocent at the time she first enters the discotheque—she orders a cherry juice at the bar—by the time she exits she will have swallowed her first mind-altering pills and connected with Sound habitués, including Detlev (Thomas Haustein), who gallantly offers her some tissues after the drugs make her puke. She admires a crude homemade tattoo on the boy’s hand, so much so that she re-creates it on her own flesh. An extreme close-up of Christiane puncturing her skin with a sewing needle dipped in India ink none too subtly foreshadows the syringe filled with skag that will go into her veins.
Natja Brunckhorst as Christiane and Thomas Haustein as Detlev in Christiane F. Courtesy Janus Films.
The girl mimics much worse than the DIY body art of the boy she loves. Undeniably voyeuristic, Christiane F. lingers ever longer on the increasingly defiling stages of its protagonist’s decline, each step replicating one already taken by Detlev: from sniffing heroin to injecting it to prowling the Bahnhof Zoo and its nearby streets in search of the johns who will subsidize her all-consuming dependency. The young couple and their pals shoot up and nod out in filthy public toilets, the rail station’s grimy corridors, and the squalid flat where Detlev crashes (one of its walls adorned with a photo of Ulrike Meinhof, shero of the Red Army Faction, the subject of Edel’s 2008 docudrama The Baader Meinhof Complex). They beg. They jerk and suck off and flog and get fucked by their clients. The film overflows with bodily fluids, never more so than when Christiane and Detlev, both trying to go cold turkey, drench the bed with sweat and she projectile vomits an amount of liquid rivaling that contained in the Spree.
David Bowie in Christiane F. Courtesy Janus Films.
For all of its sensationalism, though, Christiane F. is more than an exploitation film. Before heroin devours her, the teenager’s one great obsession is David Bowie, whose presence here, both on the soundtrack and in a concert segment, elevates the desolate film into a bizarre, exalted realm—a rock divinity alighting from the empyrean, blessing this scuzzy, low-budget project. The majority of the Bowie songs, used diegetically (the kids bop to “Look Back in Anger” at Sound) and non- (“Heroes” is needle-dropped as they tear through the Europa-Center), are culled from his “Berlin Trilogy” albums, spectral pop inspired by the years (1976–78) he lived in the capital city. (There’s some piquant irony—or is it a perverse felicity?—in the fact that Christiane F.’s music is from a man who relocated to Berlin largely to wean himself off the cocaine addiction that was ravaging his life in Los Angeles.) When Christiane goes to Deutschlandhalle to see her idol live, some trickery is required, for Bowie was in New York during the filming of Christiane F. While Udel’s cameras capture real-life throngs inside the arena, the crowd that night was there for AC/DC; the Chameleon of Rock and his band, who tear into “Station to Station,” were filmed at a small Upper West Side club, their performance edited in—an obvious suture that only adds to the pleasing incongruity of Bowie’s involvement.
Natja Brunckhorst as Christiane and Thomas Haustein as Detlev in Christiane F. Courtesy Janus Films.
And beyond its lurid subject matter, Edel’s movie functions as a kind of sinister city symphony, indelibly depicting the divided metropolis’s most execrable stretches, thronged with young people who, despite their desperation and catatonia, somehow still seem writhingly, frantically alive. (In stark contrast, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, released the same year as Christiane F., unfolds in a West Berlin seemingly devoid of all souls except for the ferociously squabbling spouses at its core.)
Each Christiane F.—the real one and the movie avatar—has remained in the public eye following Edel’s feature. Felscherinow has acted and recorded music; she published an autobiography about her life post–succès de scandale in 2013 (but seems to have been quiet ever since). Brunckhorst’s follow-up film was Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982); last year she wrote and directed a feature starring Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller. In our age of incessant recycling, perhaps I should not have been surprised to learn that Christiane F. was rebooted in 2021, transmogrified into an eight-episode Amazon series. Its cast is composed of hideously bewigged actors, none of whom look a day under thirty. A vivid, wretched heroine from more than forty years ago suffers a more insidious type of ruin: being turned into cosplaying content.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, will be published this year by Film Desk Books.