{"id":475867,"date":"2025-10-05T12:45:32","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T12:45:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/475867\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T12:45:32","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T12:45:32","slug":"the-offspring-of-influencers-rebels-in-german-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/475867\/","title":{"rendered":"The Offspring of Influencers Rebels in German Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt\u2019s hard to say something deep about shallow people, a problem \u201cBabystar<\/a>\u201d never fully gets past. Joscha Bongard<\/a>\u2019s debut narrative feature focuses on the only child of an influencer family whose public veneer of domestic perfection begins to crack when she reacts poorly to the prospect of an incoming new sibling.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s an inherent fascination to this kind of exhibitionist lifestyle that the film cannily exploits in its own sleek, advertising-like presentation. As well-crafted and acted as it is, however, the German \u201csatirical drama\u201d doesn\u2019t quite transcend the conundrum of that description: It wants to critique commodified lives without ridiculing them, while unable to drum up much involvement or empathy for figures who don\u2019t have much going on beneath the shiny surface. It\u2019s an accomplished, watchable exercise that nonetheless ultimately affords minimal insight.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Sommers are a nuclear trio inhabiting a tastefully ultra-modern if somewhat characterless home \u2014 everything within it no doubt provided by manufacturers seeking their approval \u2014 on a gated country property they seldom appear to leave. Forty-ish parents Stella (Bea Brocks) and Chris (Liliom Lewald) have apparently been marketing themselves since they were a childfree couple, as quasi-archival footage on their site shows us. And every step in the life of daughter Luca (Maja Bons), from conception to current 16-year-old status, has been duly shared with the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThese three do seem affectionately interdependent. At the same time, there\u2019s a weird, performative note to everything from shared grooming rituals to the way they say \u201cI love you\u201d as if mouthing a scripted catchphrase. When Luca has a sleepless night, she doesn\u2019t count sheep, instead reciting the names of skincare products they\u2019ve likely been paid to promote. The film opens with a visit from three kids thrilled to meet their idols, having presumably won a contest prize to do so. While the Sommers strike naturalistic postures and proclaim inspirational values, their young guests\u2019 questions suggest they\u2019ve absorbed quite different messages: They want to know about their hosts\u2019 weight, wealth, clothing brands, openness to cosmetic surgery and so forth. (To one such query, mom airily responds, \u201cTruly beautiful people require no correction.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMostly fixated on their fitness regimes and social media profiles, the parents don\u2019t appear to interact with any other adults beyond professional contacts. (Verena Altenberger gets one scene as the CEO of an AI company creating avatars of the family members for commercial sale.) When asked, Luca shrugs that she \u201cdoesn\u2019t have time for friends,\u201d let alone a boyfriend. Yet the hermetically sealed world she\u2019s accustomed to springs a leak when mom feels her out about a prospective junior sibling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe teen\u2019s existential crisis at possibly \u201cnot being special\u201d anymore drives what little narrative impetus arrives at midpoint. Her rebellion takes the form of leaving home for a hotel (where she blackmails management into giving her a luxe room), making blunt overtures toward the equally awkward desk clerk (Maximilian Mundt), and conducting a \u201cfantastic family experiment\u201d in which she basically auditions fans to see if they\u2019d like to adopt her. Meanwhile, her parents frantically hide the rift from their audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe performers are admirably committed, with Bons (who looks rather like adolescent Reese Witherspoon) credible as a sort of media test-tube baby \u2014 perfectly formed on the outside, her internal development hobbled from lack of healthy exposure to average people\u2019s reality. At one point, a subsidiary character calls her \u201csoulless,\u201d a harsh judgment, but not entirely inapt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWe\u2019re meant to simultaneously be amused and moved by Luca\u2019s plight. But even within the confines of this premise, Bongard (who previously made a similarly angled documentary, \u201cPornfluencer\u201d aka \u201cVerified Couple\u201d) and co-writer Nicole Ruethers stay on a too-neutral surface, refusing either to have much fun at their characters\u2019 expense or to probe deeply enough to make us care about them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOur heroine is given a confidante (Joy Ewulu), but the nature of that woman\u2019s interest and their relationship is kept murky. When Luca is meant to be taking a transformative leap at the end, to spare her new sibling the same under-microscope upbringing she had, there\u2019s not much impact. The film is too reserved to have rendered vivid whatever damage her parents\u2019 decisions have wrought on her.\u00a0In a sense, \u201cBabystar\u201d is like an influencer-era version of \u201cThe Truman Show,\u201d albeit with the highs and lows so smoothed out we don\u2019t feel anything much at all. Laughter and tears are two emotions too extreme to be accessed here. <\/p>\n

\n\tStill, if \u201cBabystar\u201d winds up a somewhat disappointingly mild, soft-pointed portrait of a dubious cultural phenomenon, it remains polished and well-paced enough to hold interest. The design contributions all nicely underline the notion of lives lived almost entirely for consumerism. Jonas Vogler\u2019s ethereal choral score reminds us that these superficially nice, attractive people are nevertheless as artificial in their habitat as exotic species in a zoo cage. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s hard to say something deep about shallow people, a problem \u201cBabystar\u201d never fully gets past. Joscha Bongard\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475868,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[157982,77,157983,3943,16,15,152941],"class_list":{"0":"post-475867","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-babystar","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-joscha-bongard","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-zurich-film-festival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115321629746585760","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}