3. Christiane F (1981)
Just as The Basketball Diaries features the memoirs of Jim Carroll's hellish heroin addiction, so Christiane F: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, is also a real life biographical account of heroin addiction - Deutschland style. A film that has achieved cult status, Christiane F tells the tale of the eponymous protaganist - Chritiane, a young girl who lives with her mother and brother in a drab block of apartments in West Berlin. Bored witless, Christiane hears of Sound - a new disco that is all the rage in the city. She is legally far too young to go, but she dolls herself up and is allowed in. She meets Detlef, an older boy who runs with a lot of young ones who take pills. Gradually Detlef's acquaintance leads Christiane into using pills, LSD and heroine to please him. She falls in love with him but now is a fully fledged addict. She starts stealing from home and prostituting herself at Bahnhof Zoo - a mecca for drug addled kids. She tries with Detlef to kick the junk, and their withdrawal is very realistic. This, of course, fails disastrously, and Christiane and Detlef are forced into ever more desperate circumstances of squalor, learning along the way that a good friend has died. David Bowie features prominently on the soundtrack. Now I like Bowie as much as the next guy, but having the song 'Heroes' played to constantly point out how these kids are wasting their lives gets a bit tiresome after a while. The film is scary because it does not have a stop button on the squalid depths that these poor kids go to. There is something simply hideous about watching children destroy themselves in a very naturalistic, documentary type way. I bet that parents all over Western Europe were utterly horrified when they watched Christiane F. There was at the time of the film's release, a widespread flood of heroin in Western Europe and the happenings in Christiane F must have made people watching it utterly despair for the youth of the day. Several decades later, Christiane F has not diminished in its power to disgust and appal. A very relevant cinema verité cautionary tale.