Achtung Film!
Das melancholische Mädchen
Director: Susanne Heinrich, 2018, Germany, 80 min.
With: Marie Rathscheck, Nicolai Borger, Nicolo Pasetti, Katharina Schlothauer
In German with English subtitles
A girl roams through the city looking for a place to sleep. Along the way she meets young mothers who celebrate motherhood religiously, goes home with an abstinent existentialist for whom sex is “just another market”, and waits for the end of capitalism in a drag bar. Her attempt to write a book doesn’t make it beyond the first sentence of the second chapter, and she finds no space between art galleries, yoga studios and the beds of strangers. Instead of trying to fit in, she starts regarding her depression as a political issue.
Aren’t You Happy? explores through 15 humorous encounters, our post-modern society between precarity and self-marketing, serial monogamy and neo-spirituality, disillusionment and the pressure to be happy. Susanne Heinrich’s debut film merges pop and theory, feminism and humour in a fresh way without becoming dogmatic and always with a wink of the eye.
"[...] the dry humour and kittenish kitsch of the film’s aesthetic belies just how savage is its wit. It won’t be for everyone - but then that’s presumably the point of a film which pairs intellectual provocation with sparkly unicorns." - Wendy Ide, Screen Daily
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