Modern version of a novel by Erich Kästner. Anton (10) grows up fatherless. His mother becomes ill, he takes over her job. Pünktchen comes from a wealthy family, but her parents do not have time for her. The boy and the girl try to find the money needed for Anton's mother to go on a convalescent holiday. At the end, they all go off together for a happy holiday.

Ten-year-old Anton grows up fatherless. When his mother falls ill, he takes over her job in the icecream parlour. His performance at school deteriorates accordingly. When his teacher Bremser also declares his intention to punish him for a mild brawl, his friend Luise Pogge, also known as "Pünktchen", takes the initiative and tells the teacher about the boy's problems. Anton is afraid that when his night - time job becomes public knowledge, he and his mother might lose the job and the sorely needed money.

Pünktchen's parents are wealthy, but her father, a leading cardiologist, has as little time for his daughter as his wife. As representative of a charity organization, Mrs. Pogge is usually far away in other countries; she enthuses about welfare for poor children in the Third World with whom she appears on the title page of various magazines and refuses to realize just how neglected her own daughter feels. After all, the family have a housekeeper and an au-pair to look after Pünktchen and their luxury villa.

Anton dreams of paying for his mother to stay by the sea to recover from her illness. In his despair, he steals an expensive lighter from the Pogge villa and brings trouble on himself and his mother. The boy then steals a car and tries to flee so that he can find his father. Pünktchen tries to earn a little money singing in underground stations. Finally, Carlos, who works in the icecream parlour, steals a key to the villa and sets out to rob it. Warned by Anton, the housekeeper is able to stop the burglar and he is arrested. All is well at the end of the film: Pünktchen is reconciled with her parents, Anton and his mother go to the North Sea coast for a holiday and for the first time, the girl is able to say "I'm happy!"

Caroline Link's production of PÜNKTCHEN UND ANTON is the second adaptation of the novel of the same name which Erich Kästner (1899 - 1974) wrote in 1981. While the first version produced by Thomas and Erich Engel in 1953 remained close to the original story, Caroline Link has consistently transferred the story to the present day and freed the text of the bluntly pedagogic, moralizing sentences and messages which have gone out of fashion over the decades.

"When you transfer a story to the present, there are naturally a few changes which simply cannot be avoided. There are virtually no stern governesses today to bring up the children and that is why I turned the governess into a French au-pair. I similarly did not particularly like the pompous, loveless Mrs. Pogge in Kästner's original novel. That is why I tried to make Pünktchen's mother more of a woman who is rather desperately trying to give a meaning to her high - society life and who sometimes loses sight of her own daughter's welfare in the process." (Caroline Link)

The professions of the adults have also been changed and consistently brought up to date, just like the backdrops and accessories. On one occasion, Pünktchen's mother even sends her a "video message" from Ouagadougou in the form of a VHS cassette on which Mrs. Pogge surrounded by black children declares that "these children have no-one to look after them". She cannot imagine that her own daughter should hear these words with thoroughly mixed feelings for lack of motherly affection.

At the beginning of the film, during the credits, we see children playing on a trampoline: without a care, relaxed and seemingly weightless, yet the end of the scene shows that there are limits to the longing for a playful life: Anton has to leave in order to earn money; Pünktchen is lonely without her friend, for her parents' wealth is no substitute for affection - even though her mother is convinced that she has everything a child could wish for.

Without a happy end the story would be a bitter one: Caroline Link's production is fairly light and at least superficially entertaining, sometimes also deliberately comic or even outright slapstick, as when the Pogge family's housekeeper hits the thief Carlos over the head with a frying pan. Most importantly, however, the director always halts the flow of events for a moment to create space for short musical numbers in which the characters sing and dance in front of the camera - usually it is Pünktchen. Not all German film critics welcomed these interludes, but they may well be useful in order to hold the attention of a very young audience by remotivating them with dramaturgical breaks between the many individual motifs.

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

1998/1999

Production Year

1999

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,85

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama

Topic

Relationship / Family, School, Friendship, Music, Precarity, Illness / Addiction / Physical impairment

Target Group

Junior film (7-11)

Available Media

DVD, DVD, 35mm

Original Version

German (de)

DVD

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (zh)

Note on the Format

UT Kurzzeichen;#arabisch

DVD

Subtitles

Arabic (ar), Indonesisch (id), Chinese (zh), English (en), French (fr), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Spanish (es), Russian (ru)

Note on the Format

PASCH KINO DVD mit Extra CD Rom Didaktisierung verfügbar

35mm

Subtitles

English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es)