I had missed out on this as a kid on Italian TV - but then it's hardly kids' stuff, is it? This is surely the most harrowing depiction of teenage angst - based on a true story of drug abuse and prostitution in late 70s Berlin - ever captured on film; it's certainly a long way from the cool lifestyle seen in the stylized TRAINSPOTTING (1996) - even if, in its case, the people involved were considerably older!
It's extremely well made and acted (by a mostly very young yet fearless cast, and particularly leading lady Natja Brunckhorst) but - understandably, given the subject matter - unremittingly bleak, with appropriately gritty cinematography and gloomy settings. Still, sometimes it's hard to be involved in the kids' plight, so hellbent are they on self-destruction! Powerful, unsentimental and ultra-realistic, the film is set to the exhilarating yet experimental music of David Bowie (aptly restricted to his German phase, in which he created some of his most interesting work); the pop/rock icon and sometime actor, apparently a hero of the German youth of the era, is even featured in concert footage (I was extremely lucky to have seen Bowie, even if from a distance, at London's HMV outlet in Oxford Street during the launching of his album "Heathen" in 2002)!
I'm interested in watching Edel's equally controversial LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN (1989), which had also turned up in the days when I wasn't allowed to sample such adult stuff...
It's extremely well made and acted (by a mostly very young yet fearless cast, and particularly leading lady Natja Brunckhorst) but - understandably, given the subject matter - unremittingly bleak, with appropriately gritty cinematography and gloomy settings. Still, sometimes it's hard to be involved in the kids' plight, so hellbent are they on self-destruction! Powerful, unsentimental and ultra-realistic, the film is set to the exhilarating yet experimental music of David Bowie (aptly restricted to his German phase, in which he created some of his most interesting work); the pop/rock icon and sometime actor, apparently a hero of the German youth of the era, is even featured in concert footage (I was extremely lucky to have seen Bowie, even if from a distance, at London's HMV outlet in Oxford Street during the launching of his album "Heathen" in 2002)!
I'm interested in watching Edel's equally controversial LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN (1989), which had also turned up in the days when I wasn't allowed to sample such adult stuff...