AREN'T YOU HAPPY?

The metropolitan girl of today has no easy task; she is expected to be hip and emancipated, cool and well-informed, tough, delicate, have many interests, be present everywhere but not too intrusive – all of this and much more. Taking all this into account, it’s no surprise that a girl can become melancholy. In her essayistic feature film, which was produced at the dffb film school, Heinrich – who was born in Leipzig in 1985 and has worked as a writer – confronts the neoliberal-postmodern role overkill of both consumerism and wokeness with the passive resistance of her protagonist. Aren’t You Happy? has 16 episodes, which obey anti-naturalistic principles in everything from diction to costumes, and they function as a projection surface: precisely because all the posing and deception seem to bounce off, we end up seeing an authentic figure who suffers from permanent overload. A tour d’ennui for Marie Rathscheck in the lead role, who in her character as a woman without a character is not allowed to reveal much, and compensates for it with an ending so raging that even the beach photo wallpaper dissolves into pixels – accompanied by appropriately pompous big band music. A breath of fresh air, which was awarded the main prize at this year’s Max Ophüls Festival.