Little Thirteen (3 Stars)

This film paints an ugly picture of life in today's Germany. Sarah and Charly are two young girls who live in Ahrensfelde, a few miles east of Berlin. They live close enough to Berlin to be able to experience the glitter of the big city, but they live far enough away that they don't profit from its wealth. When the two Germanys were combined in 1990 the Ossis expected immediate wealth. 20 years later they're still waiting.

Sarah is 13 and Charly is 16. Both girls live with single mothers. The only way they can have fun is going to parties, getting drunk and having sex, usually one-night stands. This doesn't make them happy. Sarah complains that she wants the act of sex to last forever, because she feels so alone when the man pulls out of her. Charly gets pregnant and decides to find a man to get married to. It can't be the father of her child, because she doesn't know his name or where to find him. Sarah meets an 18-year-old boy called Lukas in an Internet chatroom. He seems to be the right one for her, but all he's interested in is having a young girl to make amateur porn films. That's the only way he has any hope of making money.

The ugliest person in the film is Sarah's mother Doreen. Rather than try to be a good mother she wants to hold onto her youth by partying with teenagers and having young boyfriends. In fact, she's so disgusting that she seems like a caricature, I can't imagine any mother being so bad. After meeting Lukas she offers Sarah an exchange: "If you let me have sex with your boyfriend I'll let you use my new vibrator".

Nothing is as glamorous as it seems. The parties start out wild and exciting, but they end with drunken teenagers staggering from room to room. The sex is little more than in-out-in-out-time-to-go-home. The film shows inner desolation.

The film has won a few awards in Germany, which speaks for its quality. Unfortunately I can't enjoy a film which shows only misery with no hope of escape. The film is available with English subtitles, but I can't recommend it to my readers. In Germany the film has been awarded a 12 certificate, rather surprising considering the amount of nudity and the sex scenes. My suspicion is that this low age rating is intended to make the film suitable for sex education, in school and at home. I can imagine a German mother watching this film with her daughter, then telling her, "That's what will happen if you act like a slut. You'll end up pregnant and alone".