The title of Claire Burger’s film Foreign Tongue holds both literal and symbolic meaning: its leading characters, French and German teenagers Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) and Lena (Josefa Heinsius), acclimate themselves to speaking in each other’s native languages over the course of the film, yet as their relationship deepens, they also struggle to understand the distinct personal and cultural contexts that shape how they communicate. By threading political history and contemporary protest movements into an otherwise intimate adolescent love story, Burger deploys her young protagonists as stand-ins for the pains and rewards of connecting across difference — and, impressively, crafts this allegory without sacrificing complexity in narrative and characterization.
The film, written by Burger and Léa Mysius, is split into two parts of about equal length. In the first, Fanny goes to her pen pal Lena’s house in Leipzig for a month-long visit, despite Lena’s initial displeasure at having her as a guest and the fact that Fanny knows little German. Fanny, quiet and emotionally recessive, reveals to Lena after a few days that her mother, who is an old friend of Lena’s mother, sent her to stay there for a month after inescapable bullying at school and a recent suicide attempt. Lena warms to her after this honest disclosure, and the two gradually become inseparable. Lena expresses her belief in radical, leftist political action with Fanny, and her fears for the future of the world, and Fanny confides her more personal anxieties and insecurities with Lena. Fractures begin to show in Lena’s home life over this time, particularly in her complicated relationship with her emotionally immature, possibly alcoholic, mother Suzanne (a compelling Nina Hoss), while Burger drops hints that Fanny is not always honest with Lena. Yet by the visit’s end, Fanny and Lena’s relationship has blossomed into a romantic intimacy, and both girls have gained evident self-assurance.
In the film’s second half, Lena visits Fanny’s home in Strasbourg for two weeks, and the visit quickly becomes emotionally fraught. They are closer than ever, but Lena witnesses Fanny’s classmates’ cruelty toward her firsthand, and Fanny is short-tempered with her parents (Chiara Mastroianni and Jalal Altawil). They become obsessed with tracking down Fanny’s estranged sister, an antifascist activist who Fanny claims she met once and is the product of an affair her father had. Yet questions begin to mount about how truthful Fanny has been with Lena about this supposed family secret.
Burger follows the course of Fanny and Lena’s relationship with patience and detail, capturing each small change in their dynamic. Grasmug and Heinsius navigate the changing tides of the relationship capably, acting their roles with the appropriately guarded, laconic attitude of wary teenagers, then revealing deeper and more complex shades of characterization as they open up to one another. Grasmug plays Fanny as essentially good-natured and people-pleasing, but with a constantly nervous energy that tips into desperation when she feels threatened, and Heinsius reveals layers of sensitivity and fear beneath an external attitude of moral certitude.
Burger and Mysius’ screenplay also weaves political conflict and turmoil into the personal lives of Fanny and Lena. Both experience a barrage of cultural stereotypes from their peers when taking classes at each other’s schools through an exchange program, despite France and Germany’s close ties. And as the child of an Arab father (his specific nationality goes unmentioned), Fanny has had lifelong first-hand experience with racism and xenophobia, and she is placed in an uncomfortable position when Lena’s right-wing, anti-immigrant grandfather peppers her with questions about her parents’ work as Arabic translators at a family gathering.
Of all the film’s political considerations, Lena’s commitment to protest has perhaps the most direct effect on Fanny and Lena’s relationship. While Fanny is less politically activated than Lena at the film’s outset, she affects an interest in radicalism in an effort to impress Lena and to perturb her parents. By the film’s close, she seems to have become genuinely more immersed in leftist political action as a result. Initially a point of separation between them that they struggle to bridge — Lena directs most conversations back to the resurgence of far-right politics and the necessity of counteraction, while Fanny is more concerned with her personal sphere — protest and leftist politics become a site of unity for the couple, with one of the film’s final scenes showing them having a blissful night out at a bar catering to young radicals.
Despite a few hiccups along the way — Lena has several dream sequences that feel extraneous, and while Burger typically manages shifts in tone and pacing effectively, a series of emotional reversals in the film’s third act are deployed in too quick of a succession to land entirely effectively — the director deftly guides this politically-inflected love story toward a bittersweet conclusion, keeping the adolescent drama and social context in balance throughout its duration. Foreign Tongue ultimately proves to be an emotionally involving, thoughtfully acted narrative of how the personal and the political inevitably, persistently affect one another.
Published as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025 — Dispatch 1.
Comments are closed.