‘Langue Étrangère’ Review: Claire Burger’s Complex Portrait of the Borderlands of Desire

Claire Burger has used the troubled lives of the non-bourgeois to measure the pulse of culture since at least her 2009 César-winning short film It’s Free for Girls, which she co-directed with Marie Amachoukeli (Àma Gloria). That film addressed revenge porn before the phenomenon became such a common one, through the story of a working-class girl whose dream of getting her hairdressing diploma is derailed by a filmed sexual act.

In Burger’s tender and surprisingly funny third feature, Langue Étrangère, the issue du jour is the multiplicity of simultaneous crises that young people in Europe and beyond have to contend with today: from fascism to climate change, from structural racism to police brutality. Most significantly, and one of the reasons why this is such a necessary film, Burger links contemporary Europe’s political chaos to its psychic disarray. Might young people’s urge to protest collectively not also function as a smokescreen for a much more individual suffering?

For all of 17-year-old Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) and Lena’s (Josefa Heinsius) savvy in the jargon of their generation’s many “isms,” the two pen pals are illiterate in matters of the heart. But so are their parents, and Langue Étrangère argues, with disarming humor, that Fanny and Lena’s craven defense mechanisms are their inheritance. The way Burger’s film sees it, prior generations have not only handed over a planet in pieces to those coming up behind them, but have also failed to teach them a single thing about emotional survival.

Langue Étrangère opens with an unlikely encounter that, in retrospect, denounces the alienation that a so-called social media culture actually produces. Fanny, who’s being bullied in school and as such scans as the more desperate of the two, has left Strasbourg to stay with Lena in Leipzig, in a sort of student exchange program of their own making. And while it becomes increasingly obvious that both Lena and her mother, Susanne (Nina Hoss), a recent divorcée who’s been muffling the pain of divorce with one too many bottles of wine, could use a friend as much as Fanny does, things don’t work out so well at first between the girls.

Perhaps it’s the sexual attraction between Lena and Fanny that makes every interaction between them so initially awkward. As the girls try to get to know each other, questions about their personal histories emerge—about absent fathers, racialized fathers, racist grandfathers, missing sisters—and the evasions or lies they utter suggest a willingness to make living a bit less agonizing. You get the sense that, irrespective of the side of the Rhine on which it lives, the family unit in Langue Étrangère makes no space for working through complicated feelings.

Though they ultimately enjoy each other’s company the more they risk being vulnerable with one another, Fanny and Lena forge a sort of paranoid friendship that’s easy to see as emulating the relationship between France and Germany itself—one based on a guarded proximity. There’s an almost disturbing sense across the film that one girl is at once incredibly similar to and impossibly different from the other. Eventually, the girls swap houses and Lena goes to France to stay with Fanny’s mother and father (Chiara Mastroianni and Jalal Altawil), who exude a bougie patina that seeks to mask all the ways in which their home mirrors Lena’s own. Here, too, everyone is lying, unhappy, and a coward, and nobody ever listens.

Throughout, the various references to political activism’s tactics and iconography—from black blocs to balaclavas to anti-capitalist protests—that drive the plot of Langue Étrangère can feel repetitive in the face of the film’s infinitely more poignant dimensions. That is, the relationship between Lena and Fanny, in light of which the desire to be an activist all but becomes another way of masking one’s emotional desperation, which is as much of a façade as the bourgeoisie’s own methods of concealment, albeit a more well-intentioned one.

Burger evokes the erotic tension between the girls by highlighting the impossibility of speech to ever translate desire. The filmmaker understands that for someone to get to know someone new, in a way that isn’t merely transactional, is to have to give an account of oneself, which the characters in film are always struggling to do. In the off chance that someone does say what they mean as they toggle between some combination of German and French and English, sometimes all three, the other’s comprehension is bound to be partial. Here, language is forever foreign.

Perhaps inevitably, Fanny and Lena consummate their attraction mostly through dreams, where ambiguity is allowed to roam free, or mushroom-induced tripping sessions, during which another kind of language, even a kind of radical materiality, is made possible. In Langue Étrangère’s uncanniest sequence, the girls use their fingers to touch the sky they gaze upon, and as they cuddle one another, the air ripples as if it were made of liquid.

In another memorable scene, Fanny is bathing inside a hot tub, with Lena staring at her lasciviously before asking her in French whether she’s dreaming. Fanny answers her by asking, “Do you even dream in French?” Always the girls seem to be working their way through their confusion of languages and trying to live anew through dreaming. When the girls finally touch each other, it’s as if they’re replacing the linguistic and its demands for rational explanations with the beautiful, freeing irrationality of dream worlds. In them, queer pleasures are possible, and a tongue is less for speaking than for sucking, which is what Lena does to Fanny’s toes.

All the while, Burger finds poetry in what the face translates in the subtlest of ways, namely in Heinsius’s exquisitely melancholy expressions, as in a scene where Lena gets off on watching a boy making out with Fanny at her behest, before kissing her herself. Or in scenes in which Lena is processing the overwhelming drama of everyday life and the means of becoming an adult, visible through the muffling of a sob or the discrete quivering of her facial muscles. Here and elsewhere, the film finds its profundity in moments where not much is said and nothing is intellectualized, when language is stripped to its bare bones, when scripted dialogue doesn’t impose sense to images, but something much more multi-dimensional and alive-seeming.