#‘Langue Étrangère’ Review: A Tough and Tender Romance Between Two Teen Girls Finding Each Other in Translation

Crossing several borders at once, the coming-of-age romance Langue Étrangère leaps over state lines, overcomes language barriers and defies heteronormative boundaries to tell the story of two 17-year-old pen pals who fall for one another while visiting their mutual homes to brush up on their German and French, respectively.

Directed by Claire Burger — herself a native of the Franco-German frontier city of Forbach — this tender and at times tense drama is carried by superb young leads Lilith Grasmug and Josefa Heinsius, the latter making her screen debut. They play a pair of teenage girls whose cross-cultural exchange induces sexual and political awakenings they can’t always control, bringing them together but also tearing them away from their families. Premiering in Berlin’s main competition, Burger’s touching third feature is a small film with a big heart that could cross outside of Europe’s borders as well.

What’s fascinating about Burger’s approach to such well-trod terrain as the international romance (everything from Green Card to Spanglish to the recent Emily in Paris comes to mind) is how there seem to be few real cultural barriers left between the shy, inhibited Fanny (Grasmug), who’s from France, and the outspoken and political Lena (Heinsius), who’s from Germany. They’re both somewhat bilingual already, have spent time in the other’s country, and when they don’t understand the meaning of a certain expression they can always use a translation app to find it. Such fluidity also extends to their budding sexuality — they never discuss if they’re gay or straight, and they may be a little bit of both. For many of today’s cosmopolitan teenagers, the traditional boundaries we grew up with no longer exist.

The foreign language in Burger’s script, which she wrote in collaboration with Léa Mysius (The Five Devils), is therefore more of a psychological one: not grasping what the other is saying, even if you can translate the words themselves. Langue Étrangère is very much about Fanny and Lena reaching a deeper understanding as they try to survive one another’s families and wind up falling in love.

It takes a while for that to happen. At first, Fanny travels to Lena’s native Leipzig to spend a few weeks in her high school class so she can improve her German. She arrives at a household in disarray: Lena’s mother, Susanne (Nina Hoss, great as usual), has just separated from her long-term boyfriend and drowns her sorrows in too many glasses of white wine. Lena has little tolerance for her mother’s whining and barely welcomes her new guest (“My pen pal is not pally,” Fanny tells her mom over the phone). But when she sees how fragile Fanny can be, especially when she breaks down crying early on, Lena decides to introduce her to some friends and show her around Leipzig.

The contrast between the two is glaring: Lena is bold and has a rebellious streak, while the timid Fanny seems to be shaken by problems back home in France, where she claims she attempted suicide. A scene where their two classes meet via Zoom reveals where those problems may stem from, with Fanny’s French classmates mocking her as soon as they get the chance. It’s an uncomfortable sequence, as well as a telling one about the behavioral differences between the two countries. Burger also lands a few laughs when the kids are given the chance to ask the other class questions in the opposing language. (German question: “Why are the French always on strike? Don’t you guys like to work?”)

But Langue Étrangère is less about those differences than about the growing intimacy between the two girls, who spend a lot of time hanging out in Lena’s jacuzzi, creating a sexual tension that bubbles up when they take mushrooms at a party and engage in a three-way frolic with a boy — who seems to be there as a mere prop to get them closer together. Neither girl discusses her feelings aloud, because that’s the one language they can’t master, and Fanny heads back to France before anything is said between them.

The film then switches to Strasbourg, where Fanny’s mother (Chiara Mastroianni) and father (Jalal Altawil) lead more seemingly stable lives, though it’s clear they have a hard time dealing with their volatile daughter. When Lena shows up to continue the exchange in a French class, she sees right away how Fanny is an outcast in her own school. One mean girl welcomes Lena with a Nazi salute, which the latter responds to admirably with an intelligent political analysis. If there’s a single cultural lesson to be gleaned from Burger’s movie, it’s that German teens are rather kind and French teens can be totally awful.

Much of the second half hinges on the two girls searching for Fanny’s supposed hidden stepsister, who she claims is an anarchist involved in Strasbourg’s black block movement. Like many things Fanny says, it doesn’t seem entirely credible, at least to the viewer. But Lena is blinded by her own attraction and gets carried away in the search, which leads them to cut school and visit anarchist bars, creating more tension in Fanny’s home.

The movie gets increasingly political as the plot thickens, although the girls’ activism feels like another means to bring them closer together, even if Burger may have had more sincere intentions there. She’s better at depicting the jolt of emotions that hit Lena and Fanny when they can no longer ignore their feelings, leading to a finale where their respective barriers are dropped and the two finally manage to communicate clearly.

Shot in grainy handheld by Julien Poupard (Les Misérables), who uses a color palette of cloudy blues and grays, the film is very much a performance-based affair in which the excellent Grasmug and Heinsius do much of the heavy lifting. They’re well-supported by vets Hoss and Mastroianni, with the former providing the film’s one laugh-out-loud sequence when she completely loses it during a family lunch involving her ex.

Burger’s two prior features, Party Girl (co-directed with Marie Amachoukeli and Samuel Theis) and Real Love, were both set in her hometown of Forbach — a border village where people switch easily between French and German, whether it’s the language or the customs. In Langue Étrangère, her most accomplished work to date, the director movingly reveals how such shifting identifies put two girls on a path to find each other and, ultimately, themselves.