"Christiane F.," or how that chic alienation was the site of a death trip

A filmmaker friend who is a connoisseur of "lower depths cinema" and counts himself one of the film's fan warned me before I went. He thought the film treads a fine line between moralism and genuine trauma with which one has to empathize. On the second point, the film is well shot especially at times, and yes, Christiane is a sympathetic character. I felt her young kid's sense of hopefulness as she enters the arena looking for something, someone, maybe something to do that's fun or that is what people are doing.

As for moralism: indeed. Christiane enters the stadium and finds herself in a death trap. The people around her are effectively dying. They know it and are desperate to escape their condition, which they can only do by realizing it as destiny. Young men dressed in leather jackets with blank stares whose moral fault surely is that they care only about their own needs and wants. When we move from the stadium and toilets to a wall with a line of equally sad men looking to buy sex (the partial exception is a stereotypical gay gentleman of the time with a red sports car), we see more of the same. Hell is a world of other people who cannot love (care about) anyone. The heroine is the one who could survive; I won't spoil this. Is the world they are living in dying and doesn't know it? If a part of Berlin in 1977 is like this, why?

The film is weakened considerably by its narrative point of view of a parental moralism effectuated by an aesthetic of surveillance, and it thus positions the viewer even more in judgment than experiential empathy. She is drawn into the infernal scene worthy of any parent's scold (I wondered if they mightn't show this in church basements, a kind of "scared straight" marketing endeavor). I began to think I had really had enough by the time she is whipping a man who is buying sex so she can pay for smack, and the mise-en-scene in his bedroom is an arty statement meant to illustrate the styles of depravity.

I remember the Seventies as a time of feeling adrift, of nihilism. The film doesn't examine this, it depicts it. It is a document. Tales of the drug culture of the Sixties and Seventies are one kind of story, those of heroin specifically another; neither is wholly, merely sad, though in this film it is.

The uses of David Bowie warrant comment: his music, and his image, including an appearance of him as teen idol singing on stage about the Thin White Duke and of course looking the part. Bowie is the perhaps most important popular musician of the Seventies, and the most misunderstood. These concertgoers have no clue about what these songs mean; their lyrics have an acuteness that requires thought, some mental distance, and a tonic melancholy so unlike the dulled death-drive depressive and perhaps self-loathing world-weariness that we see. Though it might be argued that Bowie's music, precisely because it promoted an embrace of alienation and deviance, did not critique the nihilism that is one possible consequence, as it implicitly is here of the music's reception. We loved his androgynous cool and cult of fashionable weirdness and scarcely thought about the fact that he is not, or not only celebrating our disaffection but also looking awry at it and noticing as we do, and we self-admiringly enjoyed this alienation chic while recognizing we were admitting to our discomfort and recognizing we were not in moral decadence but something else. We were aliens in a world that was best faulted for its inability to enjoy weirdness or want to think from within this condition (and not moralize about it). Moralizing (as Todd Haynes does in his caricature of Bowie as privileged narcissist in "Velvet Goldmine") is always an easy way out; it saves you from social criticism or the work of trying to understand the history of dark and strange times. But real problems are interesting to wonder about and endure in art that poses a place and time as a question to itself and us.

As the drug scene at the stadium doesn't belong to Bowie's art; to what does it belong? The film makes me itch to think more about this, a question many films have explored. This dark, sad image of Berlin in a time of an artistic renaissance (the international art scene then centered there as much as New York, the music scene, which the iconic Bowie was involved in not only as stadium star) doesn't leave me feeling I have understand the time of my youth better; instead, it is a document, almost an editorial, for a conservative paper.

There is humor in this film despite its narrative design of sad devotion to decency, and a craftier storyteller could have made it more interesting by thinking not only about the problems of this person and place and time, but also about how we think about what we are seeing of that time. That is the difference of art from journalism: to give us not just a description or account of a situation but to make us think about how we see, even think about how we think, which only sounds funny, and in some accounts is what defines thinking proper. Film that does this well excites eye and mind together, and great films may do this constantly. Sometimes I notice more of this on a second viewing. Admittedly, this very narrative-bound film does on a viewing as virgin as poor Christiane was to a certain drug here sometimes called "H.", hit hard, as I heard from every viewer report when I was at the cinema tonight, and in more than one way.