A curated life, always under the public eye. Luca (Maja Bons) knows it no different, because her birth was streamed live on the Internet. “We get paid just for being there,” she once explains to a child follower. But she can’t really answer the question of how many friends she has: “I have 4.3 million followers on TikTok.” Luca is now 16 years old, her parents are family influencers – and so every conversation about private matters in this family, no matter how intimate, is conducted via podcast or live stream.
There is no real family warmth or connection between father Chris (Liliom Lewald), mother Stella (Bea Brocks) and Luca, every feeling is performed via an inspiring calendar saying for an invisible and yet always present public. The right energy drink for product placement is always at hand. A family idyll made of plastic that seems like a horror scenario before Joscha Bongard then narratively tears it down in his feature film debut “Babystar” – as in his documentary “Pornfluencer”, which has a similar theme.
Normal conversations are hardly possible at the dinner table. As soon as it gets personal, the live stream will start.
In Babystar’s most memorable scene, Luca later urinates into a baby potty at a fancy restaurant. But a lot still happens between the staged idyll of the first few minutes and this escalating rebellion. Perhaps triggered by social media director Julie’s (Joy Ewulu) remark that it would be okay if Luca wanted to take a break from the constant presence of the cameras, the young woman begins to rebel. And at the latest when mother Stella wants to discuss her daughter’s mixed feelings about the announcement of another pregnancy – after all, a new baby would really boost the number of clicks – in a podcast, cautious emotional withdrawal turns into open resistance.
Joscha Bongard stages the fake harmony of the influencer parallel society as a horror scenario from which there is hardly any real escape, especially for those who grew up under their conditions without being asked. The greatest strength of “Babystar” is probably that it does not portray its protagonist Luca as just a victim who rebels against what is imposed and breaks her chains in a process of liberation. Instead, Luca is both a victim and an accomplice and is taken seriously even in the not-so-easily-surmountable deformations that her childhood under constant observation has inflicted on her. She is not just a young woman who is pressured to continue playing in a game whose rules she does not determine. She’s also the one who secretly streams an Insta story from her one-night stand’s bathroom at night. Simply because she doesn’t know any different.
Celebrated role models
In its form, “Babystar” is reminiscent of many things that have been present and formative in international arthouse and festival cinema in recent years. A bit of Ruben Östlund (“The Triangle Of Sadness”), but minus the flashier outbursts. Quite a lot of Yorgos Lanthimos, although the family hell of “Dogtooth” that inevitably comes to mind seems much more surreal. In terms of atmosphere, there is definitely a touch of Sandra Wollner (“The Trouble With Being Born”), even if the science fiction references here are closer to the present and with not quite as much desire to play with ambivalence and the abyss. And always a little bit of Michael Haneke (“Happy End”), because after all he functions as a kind of grandfather in spirit for all of the filmmakers mentioned, whose dystopian sandbox films would hardly be conceivable without Haneke’s social experiments.
However, the better works of all these more or less open Haneke exegetes are characterized by something that the latter often lacks a little, namely humor. However, this can also backfire if it serves pure human hatred too openly. However, you can’t blame Joscha Bongard for that, because “Babystar” is completely sympathetic to Lucas’s struggle for self-discovery beyond all the images that have always been in the world of her without her involvement. But he doesn’t give in to the all-too-comfortable illusion that all of their chains can be broken in one big act of liberation.
The beautiful pool in the garden is not for relaxation, but rather as a pretty background for the next Insta Reel.
To what extent Luca and we will be released from the film with a kind of happy ending remains to be seen. But maybe that’s not so important, because there is no doubt that a lot of things are moving in the course of “Babystar”. And that Luca is at least starting to go his own way. So that she can perhaps at least understand the wrongness, which may certainly be further in her life, as her own to some extent.
Conclusion: “Babystar” portrays the world of family influencers with a sometimes quite dark and cool look as a very contemporary interpersonal dystopia, without slipping into despicable misanthropy. Overall, a worthwhile debut from an exciting young filmmaker.