Christine F. finally arrives for a wider audience, 25 years later.
As with so many films I love, I first encountered Christiane F. on Tumblr. Stills of actress Natja Brunckhorst, eyes bleary and dyed red hair blowing around her face, immediately caught my attention. She appears alone in nearly all the images, sitting in a dingy subway station or tending a nosebleed over a sink. Her artful dishevelment makes an obvious muse. But the connection I felt with her went beyond the aesthetic. The images clearly convey a girl in trouble, and though I wouldn’t know exactly what that trouble was until I finally watched the film years later, I felt a kinship with this girl on the streets of Berlin.
Christiane F. has not been an easy film to find. In fact, the only person I know who has seen the film in real life, apart from me, is my mother, who attended a screening twice during her time in Germany in the ’80s. The news of its Criterion Collection release and availability on Criterion’s streaming service filled me with a sense of ambivalence.
Uli Edel captures Christine’s journey with intimacy and documentarian precision.
While excited that the film will reach a wider audience and be more easily accessible, I feel a surge of protectiveness over Christiane and her story. The rawness with which the film depicts her descent into heroin addiction is seldom seen in media about young people these days. Director Uli Edel eschews gloss and ethereal montages in favor of an almost documentarian approach. The effect is a painful intimacy that might chafe at a generation so devoid of it in life and in fiction.
The film follows Christiane as she floats through the Berlin underground, first at a nightclub called Sound and then at the railway station Bahnhof Zoo. At Sound she meets Detlev (Thomas Haustein), a boy with whom she becomes infatuated. Her love manifests in a tattoo she gives herself to match his and red hair dye.
Her mother, also preoccupied with a new boyfriend, pays little mind to the changes in her daughter. The music of David Bowie, Christiane’s idol, plays throughout the film. Christiane attends his concert, where he appears as if conjured by the disaffected youth. It is at this concert that she does heroin for the first time, following Detlev into addiction and later into sex work.
We can be us, just for one day.
At first, Christiane’s time with Detlev and his friends is tinged with a glow of excitement as they flee the police through a shopping mall while “Heroes” by Bowie plays triumphantly in the background. There is an everlasting quality to the image of them silhouetted against the sky on the rooftop of the mall, an invincibility. As the ineffable connection between Christiane and Detlev blooms, Bowie’s words are a celebration and a warning: “We can be heroes, just for one day/We can be us, just for one day.”
All of the joy in Christiane F. is fleeting, with the shadow of drugs or sexual exploitation always looming until the characters are eventually consumed by it. The narrative is as transitory as Christiane’s existence, and its tragedies are abrupt, the harsh suddenness removing any feeling of safety. As Christiane’s circumstances become increasingly dire, Bowie’s presence begins to vanish from her life. She attempts to sell her records for drug money, and his music no longer provides the soundtrack to her life. Instead, she suffers in silence.
The tragedy inherent in the depiction of Christiane’s addiction in the film is that she is shooting up in pursuit of connection: with the boy she loves and his friends, both of whom she fails to find true community with. Her participation in this ritual goes from an aesthetic tribute, like her tattoo and hair, to an all-consuming need.
It’s easy to lose the effects of drug addiction in films due to prioritizing aestheticism. Directors use the opportunity to experiment with cinematography and music rather than engage with addiction’s reality. The most brutal moments in Christiane F. are rightfully ugly. There’s nothing for the audience to latch onto to soften the experience of watching a girl lose control. Few films allow their female subject to reach such low points with so little judgment and objectification. Edel is always most interested in Christiane’s face and the emotions it conveys.
As the music quiets, so too does Christine’s capacity for joy.
Complicating the legacy of Christiane F. is the fact that the film is based on the life of a real woman, Christiane Felscherinow, who wrote the book on which the film is based. Unlike the Christiane of the film, who ends the story sober and away from the drug scene in Berlin as if from a distant dream, Felscherinow’s narrative is not so neatly concluded. In a 2013 interview about her second autobiographical book, she reflects on her cultural legacy:
“‘What bothers me most of all is this Christiane F. thing,’ she continues. ‘Is she finally clean now, or not? As if there is nothing else to say about me. And I can’t get clean. It’s just what everyone else has always expected of me.’ She shakes her head emphatically.
Her gestures are forceful, and she looks muscular and slim. In this moment, little indicates that this woman’s body is being decimated by pills and plenty of alcohol. She smoked two joints in the morning, she says. She has also been taking methadone for about 20 years, like 75,000 other drug addicts in Germany. Despite the methadone, she says that there are times when she throws caution to the wind and buys a few grams of heroin. This happens when she feels she can no longer cope with the stresses of the outside world. ‘The doctors complain. But I do have a life, after all. And I’m not clean, just as all the others aren’t clean, either,’ she says. ‘I study the faces I see on the subway every day. Everyone is trapped, somehow.’”
An empathetic ode to girls in trouble.
It is understandable that Felscherinow resents her cultural legacy as a woman defined by her addiction. But I believe that the obsession with her sobriety has less to do with the film itself and more to do with society’s intolerance for girls in trouble. It is a shame that for many audience members, their empathy for Christiane is conditional upon her sobriety at the end of the film.
As a woman who struggled with mental illness for the entirety of her adolescence and early adulthood, I can see how Felscherinow would chafe against the interpretation of her story having what many will perceive as a happy ending. I did not feel happy at the end of Christiane F. As Christiane contemplates Detlev’s fate, mourning friends who didn’t survive their addictions, I was struck by the thought that being a girl in trouble stays with you. Reading Felscherinow’s interview cemented this for me. Christiane F. isn’t simply a drug film; it’s a tribute to girls in trouble, with and without happy endings.
Christiane F. is streaming on the Criterion Channel now and received its Criterion Collection release on October 20, 2026.
