Claire Burger came to prominence on winning Cannes’ Camera d’Or for 2014 Un Certain Regard opener Party Girl, co-directed with Marie Amachoukeli and Samuel Theis. She followed that up with the best film prize at Venice Days 2018 for her first solo outing, Real Love.
Now with her third feature Langue Étrangère, Burger revisits her youth and what she calls “my own double French-German culture that is part of my identity”, having grown up in Forbach, a former industrial town in the Grand Est region of France, right on the German border.
Langue Étrangère follows a pair of 17-year-old girls — the more shy and withdrawn Fanny from France and outspoken political activist Lena from Germany — who spend time with each other’s families in their respective countries as part of a language-exchange programme. They form a strong, life-changing bond even as Fanny’s lies threaten to upend the relationship.
“These two characters represent two facets of myself,” Burger says of the film, which is sold here by Goodfellas. The writer/director, a graduate of France’s prestigious La Fémis film school, participated in several language-exchange programmes when she was younger. “When I went abroad, I wanted to be someone else, to reinvent myself in a different place, in a different language, and it worked.”
Lockdown ennui
Such escapism was the catalyst for a story she began writing during the Covid pandemic, a time of local and national lockdowns in France when, says Burger, “Young people were not handling it well, particularly in my family. All around me, there were suicide attempts, anorexia, physical and mental struggles. It really impacted me so I wanted to write about how this generation was affected.”
The script was originally written for characters around the age of 13, but Burger asked to meet actress Lilith Grasmug after seeing her in Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Bloody Oranges. “I rarely write for actors and she was too old for the part, but I had her audition anyway,” she says. Burger ended up rewriting the film with Grasmug in mind, making both leads older. A long search eventually led to German newcomer Josefa Heinsius being cast as Lena.
Burger’s own experience with language-exchange programmes were mostly in the UK, so her original plan was a Franco-British story. But her producer, Anatomy Of A Fall’s Marie-Ange Luciani, suggested she set the film closer to her roots in Germany. Luciani’s Les Films de Pierre produced with Belgium’s Les Films du Fleuve and Germany’s Razor Film Produktion.
Langue Étrangère was shot between Leipzig and Strasbourg, with the set a microcosm of the film itself, a melting pot of languages and accents where “everyone could translate for everyone so we somehow always managed to understand each other”.
Language was not the only barrier. While her own experience growing up on the Franco-German border was relatively harmonious, “making such a co-production work wasn’t as simple as I imagined. France and Germany have very different film industries and ways of making movies. It turns out it’s not easy to talk about the Franco-German relationship.”
Nina Hoss plays Lena’s German mother and Chiara Mastroianni plays Fanny’s French mother. “These two girls — and their families — are a metaphor of the relationship between France and Germany and the entire European Union,” Burger continues. “We don’t always believe each other, we often lie to each other, sometimes we don’t understand each other, but we try to comprehend even beyond the question of language.”
Making the film with a close circle of collaborators was also key for Burger. She co-wrote the script with The Five Devils’ Léa Mysius and then, she says, “Justine Triet re-read the script; Robin Campillo, Alice Winocour, Catherine Corsini and the Dardenne brothers gave me notes. It’s great to collaborate. Cinema is a collective art — it’s like an intergenerational family who work together.” Burger has even taken small acting roles in her friends’ films, in Triet’s Victoria and in Theis’ Softie.
For Burger, the real challenge of Langue Étrangère was telling an intimate story that has something to say about today’s younger generation. “I’m not making superhero films,” she says. “What is most important for me is that audiences like the characters. I want people to be moved by their humanity.”
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