“Christiane F.,” the 1981 cult classic nightmare vision of a teen girl’s descent into heroin addiction in West Berlin, makes even “The Panic in Needle Park” look like a walk in the, well, you know.
German filmmaker Uli Edel adapted a harrowing nonfiction book by Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck with testimonies from users who haunted the drug-cruising spot at Berlin’s Zoo Station, including from Christiane Felscherinow, who was 13 when she fell into the wrong crowd and started shooting up amid the underground club scene. For the film version, Edel cast then-unknown actress Natja Brunckhorst (who would later write her own memoir about her experience making “Christiane F.”) as the David Bowie-worshipping teen addict experimenting with first love and drug use. Felscherinow eventually became an actress and musician herself.
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Now, a new 4K restoration from Janus Films of “Christiane F.” opens at Film at Lincoln Center starting June 20, with screenings on the West Coast at the Los Feliz Theatre in Los Angeles. Edel takes a decidedly non-moralistic approach to capturing the actual drug-addled youth who populated Berlin in the ’70s; at one point, Christiane (Brunckhorst) stumbles in a bleary daze through a tunnel lined with strung-out punks, needles hanging out of their arms and their eyes glazed over. It’s one of many documentary-like moments in “Christiane F.,” as the filmmakers captured real users in the underpass. As for the graphic nudity among minors seen in the film, that’s now illegal, but the first-time actors’ parents consented at the time.
Justus Pankau and Jürgen Jürges’ cinematography likely hasn’t looked this shockingly vivid since the film’s 1981 release, when Roger Ebert called it “one of the most horrifying movies I have ever seen.” Edel captures the jet-black streets at night and the bunker-like postwar subterranean of Berlin in a way that feels oddly romantic and nostalgia-worthy — especially under the gleaming neon signage of the trendy discotheque Sound — without ever romanticizing a youth-culture-killing drug epidemic.
“Christiane F.” also stands out for its soundtrack, supplied by David Bowie with songs from the albums “Heroes” (including the title track, playing almost triumphantly as Christiane joins a marauding band of street kids wreaking havoc in a mall), “Station to Station,” “Lodger,” and “Low.” There’s even an excerpted David Bowie concert, originally shot in New York, juxtaposed with audience shots from an AC/DC concert in West Germany. Bowie’s inclusion makes for a cutting contrast between the doomy glamor of Berlin’s late-’70s club scene with the darkness thrumming beneath it.
Edel, working from Herman Weigel’s screenplay, neither shies away from the brutality of Christiane’s plunge into underage sex work nor the cold-turkey withdrawal hell she experiences with her boyfriend (Thomas Haustein), where they end up scrambling desperately for another fix. Once clean and with help from her mother to get sober, Christiane thinks she can handle one more shot in the arm, but that proves impossible as she’s thrown into more tragic circumstances.
“Christiane F.” functions on its own terms as a piece of provocative pure cinema, but it’s also in a social dialogue with the rise of cautionary tales like the controversial American “memoir” “Go Ask Alice” from 1971, which charts a 15-year-old girl’s self-destruction and was later deemed fiction. The book was used as an educational tool to warn kids off drug use, a tradition of agenda-driven anti-drug art that began with the American exploitation movie “Reefer Madness” in the 1930s, and of course continued with myriad after-school specials. (Helen Hunt in “Desperate Lives,” anyone?) “Christiane F.” inadvertently might have served the same purpose, but Edel isn’t chasing moral instruction here. He’s capturing a moment, a milieu, and it’s one that the real-life Christiane eventually pulled herself out of, unlike many of her friends.
Janus Films‘ 4K restoration of “Christiane F.” opens at Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, June 20.
