Jasna Fritzi Bauer stars as a fifteen-year-old trying to navigate the perilous waters of adolescence in the surprisingly heartwarming, coming-of-age comedy About a Girl. Charleen (Bauer) finds solace in the images of musical geniuses who died young, praying at the altar of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Buckley and Kurt Cobain. It’s no coincidence that the film shares its title with the Nirvana song of the same name off of their debut, Bleach. “About a Girl” is one of the few singles from the album that the band continued to perform up until Cobain’s suicide in 1994. Morbid and overly anxious about growing up, Charleen decides to end her life.
After her plan fails, Charleen must deal with the mortifying task of having to justify her actions to her well-meaning mother (Heike Makatsch) and an eccentric psychologist (Nikolaus Frei). While there is no explanation for her pessimism, her parents divorce when she was a child, and the resulting absence of her musician father (Aurel Manthei), from whom she likely acquired her musical tastes, prove a defining moment in her life. A fledgeling artist and photographer, she expresses her preoccupation with death by drawing and snapping dead animals on her Polaroid camera.
Charleen seems to long to connect authentically in a world that is hyper-connected in the most emotionally and physically disconnected ways. Not at all keen to fit in with her peers, including an empathetic best friend (Amelie Plaas-Link), Charleen bucks modern technology and instead prefers to use a Walkman and a basic cell phone. She doesn’t even know her annoying little brother has an online following. Aside from her sweet and reliable grandmother (Dorothea Walda), the only other person Charleen relates to is the nerdy Linus (Sandro Lohmann), but she considers him a freak.
The movie is intelligent and unconventional, sprinkled with a touch of whimsy à la Amelie and reminiscent of American independent films such as Garden State and Juno. The charismatic Bauer imbues the part with wit and humor. Fortunately for Charleen, the fallout from her failed suicide attempt, while at first mortifying, ultimately reveals that life isn’t as hopeless as she thinks. In fact, it’s pretty awesome.
