Film Review: Big Girls Don't Cry (Große Mädchen weinen nicht, 2002)
American teen drama Thirteen was one of the more talked about films in 2003, later becoming known as springboard for careers of director Catherine Hardwicke and actress Evan Rachel Wood. Its subject matter and controversially realistic depiction of dysfunctional teenagers also suppressed similar German film that had appeared few months earlier, 2002 drama Big Girls Don’t Cry, written and directed by Maria von Heland.
Like in Thirteen, protagonists of Big Girls Don’t Cry are two teenagers, although they are slightly older and, at least, nominally less dysfunctional. Kati (played by Anna Maria Mühe) and Steffi (played by Karoline Herfürth) are two high school students who were best friends since childhood, despite different social background. Kati grew up in modest blue collar family that maintains traditional Christian values, while Steffi’s parents belong to upper middle class and like to present themselves as “liberated” and progressive. They like to hang out together and that includes visit to a night club, where Steffi would, to her utmost horror, see her father in compromising position with woman other than her mother. Infuriated, decide to get revenge on woman by having her teenage daughter Tessa (played by Josephine Domes) tricked into humiliating band audition. But when Tessa actually performs well, Steffi is further enraged and plots even more sinister trick by using her acquaintance Yvonne (played by Jennifer Ulrich) to set Tessa on a photo shoot with a pornographer. Kati thinks that Steffi went over the line and intervenes, endangering her friendship in the process.
Big Girls Don’t Cry was first major feature film for Swedish director Maria von Heland. It nevertheless represents work of a confident and experienced film maker, directed with steady hand and putting relatively limited resources of German cinema in a way that make her film actually superior to many Hollywood films of the same sort. Big Girls Don’t Cry doesn’t invent a wheel and its script revolves about universal issues of coming to age and many challenges teenagers face in modern world. What sets it apart from Hollywood is being unburdened with MPAA censorship standards. Because of that von Heland is much more explicit in dealing with issues of sex, drugs. However, film at times ventures in rather dark territory that even involves violence against women and almost becomes crime thriller, making the ending somewhat disappointingly conventional and Hollywood-like. Big Girls Don’t Cry, on the other hand, benefits a lot from young, good looking and enthusiastic cast, especially Karoline Herfurth. Big Girls Don’t Cry is a good film, although it was unfortunately overshadowed by its better publicised Hollywood equivalent. Those who watch von Heland’s work now are likely to conclude that it deserved much more recognition.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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