Girl Gang begins as a tale – once upon a time there was a young girl… – told on the nostalgic images of the Berlin early morning (see the trailer on YouTube). A fable about the modern loneliness of young girls, who find in the little black mirrors in their pockets access to all the other young girls in the world. Rarely has the emptiness of social networks been described with so much poetry. And this simple narrative idea gives Susanne Regina Meures’ documentary a magical dimension, which also sounds like a warning and places it immediately beyond the individual portrait, to attempt that of an era.
After the Iranian electronic scene in Raving Iran and the flight out of Saudi Arabia into Saudi Runaway, the German trained in Zurich sticks her camera in the footsteps of Léonie, 14 years old. The girl has long red hair and a precocious talent for makeup. As soon as she turns on the spotlight in her bedroom-studio, she puts a charming smile on her sulky adolescent face and addresses her tens of thousands of fans. Léonie is an influencer. In the suburbs of Berlin where she lives with her parents, she chronicles her daily life (a little) and promotes the products of the brands with which she collaborates (a lot).
Sponsored publications and incessant injunctions
His life is punctuated by sponsored publications, the incessant injunctions of his parents, who are also his managers, to meet deadlines and to “be authentic”, since that is what works best. The price to pay to stand out and make a living in the cutthroat world of influence. Andreas and Sani have understood this well and clumsily attempt to play their roles as both parents and managers, making their daughter a family business. “I don’t have a dream of my own,” says the mother, while the father goes a step further: “I’m living my daughter’s dream.”
A fiction: «Sweat», from the mother and the selfies
There is a real violence in this family dynamic that goes through the permanent staging of oneself. But the further the documentary progresses, the more we feel that it is not the parents who are responsible for it – that would be too simplistic a reading, they are only cogs. The gigantic and frenetic hamster wheel at the service of consumption that is social networks runs out of steam and crushes all the characters. Their image and their body are their working tools. It is only a short step to think that Marx would have drawn from it a relevant analysis of alienation through work.
As in all tales, there is a price to pay to achieve happiness. The radical and strongly oriented choice of Susanne Regina Meures never to show Léonie either at school, which she nevertheless attends, or at football, which she plays, isolates her. The film gives the impression, without us being able to judge what it really is, that she does not rub shoulders with anyone else her age. A choice that reinforces the most terrible sentence uttered by the mother: “The only thing Léonie had to give up to pursue her career as an influencer was her social life.”
Absurdity of situations
Despite her hyperpresence, it is not Léonie who recounts her life in this documentary. We look at her with a magnifying glass, we hear her arguing with her parents like all teenagers her age, but there is always a feeling of distance. The choral music that covers the direct sound of many sequences takes us further away from his emotions, in favor of the absurdity of the situations. She is like a butterfly under a glass jar: we observe each shimmer of her colors, without ever being able to touch her.
To read: “Instagram participates in the “pornification” of the world”
The “gang” of the title is not the one that surrounds the young influencer, but designates the thousands of little girls, sometimes very young, who gather at public events, their eyes wet and their hands stretched out towards their idol. One of them, Mélanie, is riveted between twelve and seventeen hours a day on her phone, according to her own count, which she spends, among other things, managing a Léonie fan account. His dream is to meet her one day, even for a few seconds. Mélanie carries the essence of the narrative of the documentary and gives us her moods. She is the little peasant girl who dreams of being close to the princess. And even if the director refuses to pass judgment on her characters, all tales have a moral. While Léonie, whose popularity continued to grow after the filming, remains stuck in her plastic reality, Mélanie will gradually detach herself from her idol, discovering friendship “in real life».
«Girl Gang»by Susanne Regina Meures (Switzerland, 2022), 1h38.
