Die Heartbreakers

...you'll surely like this. "Die Heartbreakers" is about a bunch of teenagers who live in a bleak part of Germany in the 60's and adore bands like The Kinks and The Rolling Stones. They start their own band called "The Heartbreakers" as an escape from the dull working class life. There's a little love story included, too as Freitag, The Heartbreakers' bandleader, gets to know a girl who becomes both, his lover and his rival as a singer. The acting is fine for a German movie, the music is good, too, although all the songs are performed "too well". No band can play that perfectly live. But, hey, that's just part of the charm of this kind of movies. Actually it's why we watch them.

I like the movie. I watched it the first time when I was twelve, and that was mostly because one of the actors was in my sister's class in High School. It is a classic teenager-coming of age story, and the amateur like air makes it somewhat endearing. I have to correct my pre-poster though, the setting is not east Germany, but Recklinghausen in the Ruhrgebiet in the 1960ies. The area is known for its working class culture and there are a lot of films that depict this. Some of the actors went on to become actors for German television (not my schoolmate though.. as far as I know.) Personally I liked the Soundtrack a lot, I still have it on an old worn tape and play it every once in a while.

I don't really get the reviews. What's amateurish about the film? Peter Bringmann is hardly an amateur but a highly competent and professional TV director. The Heartbreakers is a very entertaining coming of age story, very charmingly told with a very good screenplay and scenes you remember years after watching it. It's good to see a director crediting working class people with creativity and dignity- long before The Commitments. Most of all, the film is a very lovingly put together period piece in which every detail is just right. Normally I'm not a fan of films set in this area of Germany as I don't quite like romanticising an essentially ugly part of the country but there is no false nostalgia here. It's rough, it's dirty, it's ugly- it's real.