Pool Of Princesses

Teenagers today, eh? If you think all the British ones think about is boys and booze it turns it out they’re not alone - those German kids are just as bad, if this documentary is to be believed.

Bettina Blümner tracks three 15-year-old German girls - Klara, Mina and Tanutscha - over the course of the year, recording their thoughts on their lives, their families and their future. All the girls live with their mums in single-parent families, all smoke like twitch heaps and all are vary degrees away from the edge of the tracks.

Klara is blonde, beautiful and closest to throwing her life down the tubes. “Klara could have been perfect,” says Tanutscha, “But she really fucked up.”. By which she means Klara is attending truancy school - where she seems to do quite well - and is also putting in hours of community service as a waitress after a bungled bit of theivery. She clearly has a string of men, all of whom are much older than her.

Mina and Tanutscha are more heavily pierced than Klara, but quieter. Mina is going steady with her boyfriend George and it creates increasing amounts of distance between her and her pals. Tanutscha, on the other hand, is just desperate to get through school and fed up of being treated like a child.

The question is, how much is there to be gained from this insight into disaffected teens? Not a lot, really. They’re pretty typical, although perhaps fractionally more wild than the average children. It’s hard to know what Blümner is driving at. Is she trying to make a statement on the state of Germany today? The problems of single parenting? The film holds little relevance to a British audience, except, possibly, as something with which to compare and contrast kids on this side of the Channel. As vox pop after vox pop with the girls rolls by the point of it all becomes less and less clear.

The documentary lacks any kind of structure or information from adults - except brief, stilted conversations with their mums - meaning Klara, Tanutscha and Mina’s lives hang, unfleshed out. I imagine this documentary will hold only limited interest even for a German audience and, unfortunately, any message it may once have had fails to travel to foreign viewers.