Name: Langue Etrangere Review: Teenage Longing and Rebellion in a Fractured Europe
Item: Langue Etrangere
Author: Shahrbanoo Golmohamadi

French director Claire Burger may not be a household name yet, but arthouse fans are surely familiar with her empathetic style. Known for highlighting marginalized voices, her breakout feature Party Girl movingly explored the life of a 60-something nightclub hostess. Burger’s latest continues her focus on complex female protagonists with Langue Etrangere (Foreign Tongue). This tender coming-of-age story follows two teenagers, Fanny and Lena, who form an intense bond through their involvement in a French-German exchange program.

As with most teen romances, hormones and peer pressure are inevitably part of the equation. But Burger and co-writer Léa Mysius craft a more nuanced portrayal of adolescent life. The girls’ budding same-sex attraction hints at their emerging sexual fluidity, while their impulsive rebellion speaks to the unique turmoil of their generation. Having come of age during an era of political upheaval and global health crises, both leads straddle multiple borders—cultural, linguistic, sexual. Their tentative friendship becomes a salve for the loneliness and trauma bubbling under the surface.

While a surface-level read may focus solely on the affair’s Sapphic intrigue, Langue Etrangère ultimately transcends genre. Burger continues to demonstrate her knack for locating the poetry in ordinary lives. With empathetic precision, she reveals how personal troubles manifest into activism, rendering visible the connections between individual and collective healing.

An Intimate Bond Forged Across Borders

When 17-year-old Fanny boards a train from Strasbourg to Leipzig, she’s desperately seeking an escape. Bullied by her French classmates, the shy teen views a foreign exchange program as a chance to start fresh. But upon arriving on her pen pal Lena’s doorstep, Fanny faces a less-than-warm welcome. Between an absentee father and a newly divorced mother hitting the wine bottles, Lena’s household is nearly as dysfunctional as the one Fanny left behind.

At their German school, tensions continue to simmer between the two girls. While the extroverted Lena skips class to attend political protests, Fanny’s traumatic past leaves her withdrawn and questioning. During a revealing video call between their French and German classmates, Fanny endures cruel taunts from her Strasbourg peers. But witnessing her vulnerability, Lena extends an olive branch. An intimate friendship blossoms as each sees reflections of their own sadness and disillusionment in the other.

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Fanny finds solace in Lena’s world of late nights and psychedelic experimentation. An erotic encounter in Lena’s hot tub stokes a nascent sexual attraction between the teenagers. By the time Fanny returns to France, their bond has been cemented. The girls swap cities, with Lena now embarking on her own exchange trip to Strasbourg.

Here, the cracks in Fanny’s fabricated stories start to show. She speaks of a missing anarchist sister yet her parents make no mention of another daughter. When Lena falls for a handsome activist, Fanny spirals into jealous obsession. Her tall tales turn dangerous as she pulls Lena deeper into an underground protest scene. But beneath her deceit and acting out lies the aching truth—that for youth facing an uncertain future, sometimes connection itself feels like an act of rebellion.

Navigating Adolescence in a Fractured Europe

At its core, Langue Etrangère utilizes the coming-of-age genre to offer an empathetic window into the chaotic inner world of today’s teenagers. Burger’s lens captures her young protagonists in all their contradictions—at once vulnerable and reckless, sensitive and self-destructive. Lilith Grasmug brings a wounded fragility to the role of Fanny, a girl so desperate to be seen that she retreats into compulsive lies. As Lena, newcomer Josefa Heinsius radiates youthful passion coupled with a jaded outlook beyond her years.

Situated along the Rhine River border, the film highlights both the profound similarities and subtle differences between French and German culture. Initially, the students trade surface-level barbs about work ethic and protest norms. But as Fanny and Lena’s friendship develops, deeper connections emerge. Both find themselves caught in familial patterns of miscommunication and unresolved grief passed down through generations.

From this tense domestic backdrop arise questions of personal responsibility and political action. Susanne drinks away her pain over a failed marriage; Fanny’s parents ignore her deteriorating mental state. The adults, still scarred from their own turbulent upbringings, prove incapable of functioning as stable role models. An urgent sense of having been abandoned by previous generations permeates the teens’ worldview. They turn to rebelliousness and radical politics to fill this void.

The girls’ isolation draws them to seek comfort in each other, allowing for tender exploration of their burgeoning sexual attraction. Yet their bond remains complicated by trauma and distrust. When intimacy collides with Fanny’s pathological lying, their relationship threatens to become yet another channel for self-harm. For all its progressive sheen, Langue Etrangère refuses easy categorization; its portrait of modern teenage life is messy, contradictory, and achingly human.

Ultimately, Burger confronts the unique burden facing Europe’s youth today—that of forging an identity and finding purpose in a landscape still fractured by the political schisms and unhealed social wounds of the past. That Fanny and Lena stumble through self-discovery together feels less an optimistic resolution than an acknowledgement of the Sisyphean challenges ahead.

Capturing the Pangs of Youth

Much of the praise centered on Langue Etrangère has focused on the revelatory performances from relative newcomers Lilith Grasmug and Josefa Heinsius. As the troubled Fanny, Grasmug brings a wounded intensity to her scenes, allowing the audience to see past her character’s deceits. Heinsius imbues Lena with a fiery spirit, hinting at her outward defiance masking profound disillusionment. Together, the two share an electrifying chemistry belying their young age.

In smaller yet pivotal supporting roles, veterans Nina Hoss and Chiara Mastroianni offer further insights into the familial dysfunction plaguing both households. Hoss is particularly memorable as Lena’s wine-guzzling mother Susanne, unflinchingly portraying the messiness of a woman still grieving the death of a marriage.

Beyond the acting, much credit is owed to Claire Burger’s sensitive direction. Her intimate handheld style puts us firmly in the subjectivity of the teens, heightening the dizzying swings of adolescent emotions. When Fanny first arrives on Lena’s doorstep, tight shots of furtive glances and awkward silences reveal two girls sizing each other up. Later, during a pivotal party scene, the camerawork turns fluid and dreamlike, immersing us in the reckless abandon induced by psychedelics.

Cinematographer Julien Poupard opts for a muted color palette dominated by blues and grays, perfectly capturing the atmospheric melancholia of winter in eastern France and Germany. Street scenes around Strasbourg’s medieval corridors heighten a brooding Romantic aesthetic. Burger allows the urban locations themselves to function as characters—both vessels for, and catalysts of, her protagonists’ yearning.

Haunting piano and strings from composer Rebeka Warrior provide the final brushstroke, underlining the film’s romantic trajectory. The score swells tentatively during intimate scenes, as if giving voice to words left unsaid between the girls. With patience and precision, Langue Etrangère’s formal elements coalesce into a powerful, profoundly affecting mood piece.

A Compelling Portrait of Millennial Angst

While the plot strains credulity at times, the film soars on the strength of the central performances and Burger’s insightful direction. She continues to demonstrate a keen understanding of the female psyche, approaching her flawed characters with non-judgmental compassion. As Fanny and Lena fumble towards intimacy, their profound connection hints at the healing power of vulnerability in a fractured world.

Langue Etrangère joins other recent European indies like Berlin prizewinner Before, Now & Then in grappling with the continent’s ideological growing pains through the lens of personal relationships. The micro depicts the macro. For all the sociopolitical turmoil burbling under its surface, the film’s core remains two lonely girls braving the dizzying terrain of self-discovery. And by portraying their solidarity amid shared precarity, Burger strikes a note of tentative hope.

The Review