Thanks For Nothing gives Filmfest München a great coming-of-age story

Stella Marie Markert writes and directs a sparkling, radiant, never superficial, and sensibility-filled women’s tale

There are many different ways to create a coming-of-age film, and Stella Marie Markert’s Thanks For Nothing, which premiered at Filmfest München, is certainly one of the best recent examples. That’s because of its capacity to combine depth with lightness, and fun with a look that is anything but superficial or obvious about adolescence—not simply specific to that generation we like to call Z. Thanks For Nothing has four girls as its protagonists, four peers living in the same apartment. They are not just any girls, though; they are defined as “disturbed,” or otherwise with major psychological issues, and they are followed and monitored to make sure they get back on the straight and narrow.

There is Katharina (Lea Drinda), who since childhood has shown serious self-injuring and suicidal tendencies, which are perpetually foiled and then have no effect. She seems almost to have popped out of another time and another world, and she is very attached to Ricky (Safinaz Sattar), daughter of immigrants, who is her opposite. As feminine, cool and reserved as Katharina is, Ricky is surly, strong, sharp-tongued, a real tomboy who now, as she approaches 18, faces the real possibility of not being recognized as a German citizen and having to leave the country she considers her own. 

The most peculiar of the group is the silent, indeed essentially mute, Malou (Zoe Stein), who has not spoken in years and has always been described as brilliant but difficult. To top it off there is Victoria (Sonja Weißer), beautiful, narcissistic, given to partying, drugs, and alcohol, the daughter of a very rich dynasty, thus closing a quartet that in theory—very much in theory—should be monitored by their tutor, Ballack (Jan Bülow). The clinic’s director, Dr. Rottenborn (Kathrin Angerer), no longer knows what to do with them, in their house where each of the four is on her own anarchic existence of parties, boyfriends, minimal housekeeping, and incommunicability.

They are four universes so different, and yet so capable of understanding each other, helping each other, each with her own secrets, weaknesses, and problems to solve. Thanks For Nothing is divided into chapters, each dedicated to a protagonist, and it is a colorful, lively film; it has a particularly vintage flavor, in fact it shows us an everyday life that, perhaps, belongs more to the 1990s or early 2000s than to this technocratic era. However, what makes Thanks For Nothing a very accomplished film is the evolution of the characters in a creative script armed with sparkling dialogue. Markert creates a perfectly balanced dramedy, without being either overindulgent to or harsh on the protagonists. Beautiful cinematography by Edgar Fischnaller and Jonas Kolahdoozan, which enhances an urban, intimate, very colorful and eye-catching setting, serves a directing style that knows how to keep the right distance but more importantly knows when to get close. In some ways a classic film in its female-driven storytelling setting, but one that also has male characters who are anything but superficial or predictable. All four female leads are very good, meshing with each other to perfection as they show us what the world calls pathologies and disorders. 

But they are almost always mere pleas for help, the end result of an adult world of incommunicability, coldness, and lack of empathy, of disdain for those who are different from the norm. Thanks For Nothing winks at times at the American and British coming-of-age picture, but it is never predictable, and above all, it knows when to speed up and when to slow down, to let us savor each protagonist’s small victories and defeats, why they became the way they are. It extols loneliness as an escape route, linked to diversity as an anchor of salvation, as a refuge of one’s own will, in a society that appears to us as the invisible oppressive cage it often is at that age. Thanks For Nothing is always truthful, in spite of everything, and it turns out to be ideal to tell us about a really difficult age, often portrayed on the small and big screen in a sweetened or rhetorical way, or overly dramatic. Which makes it, if possible, even more interesting.

Giuliu Zoppello
Edited by Robert Horton
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