The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 7-13
Christiane F. (1981)
Directed by Uli Edel
Christiane F. is an unabashedly pulpy and impeccably crafted adaptation of the quasi-journalistic heroin-sploitation novel Wir Kinder von Bahnhof Zoo, which chronicles the dive into sex work and heroin taken by its titular barely teenage protagonist in 1980s Berlin. (The real Christiane F. also co-wrote the book.) The draw of the film, perhaps, is Bowie playing himself in prime Station to Station form, or the renowned wine vomit withdrawal scene, but the crucial aspect of the film is its rare emphasis on film, heroin and music as legitimate emotion-producers. The highs are high—that Bowie concert!—and the lows are low—shooting up in shit-stained bathrooms, that wine vomit—but the film is unrelenting in its commitment to color, texture, sound, music, motion, and melodramatic form as gripping response-generators, dragging the viewer joyfully or sickeningly along this shamelessly enjoyable plunge into an unapologetic abjection. It recognizes that heroin, for all the horrors it can cause, is not some exceptional experience but rather a ramping up of a certain set of chemical responses like any other. It was no surprise that this was a favorite film of the co-author and star of my first feature film, themselves a heroin addict and sex worker. It may be maudlin, sure, but it’s deeply in tune with how a maudlin experience is created and consumed. Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli (December 12, 6:55pm at the Alamo Drafthouse)