Some Twin Pop

This film is a little radical monument. A few moments in the lives of two girls who are simply “totally bored.” One of them got into a “spat” in school and was grounded. The other shares the sentence, at her friend’s mother’s book shop. They dance and tease a fellow student on the telephone. But when a customer comes into the shop, a short conversation unfolds. The guy, who wants to buy a book for his grandmother, makes a move on the girls. Quite aggressively, even. He wants to go swimming with her. Then it is completely dull again. Music thunders over the final credits. Director Lisa Weber has a gift: she releases her characters from all attributions and levels of meaning and thereby enters a terra incognita in Austrian contemporary cinema; The teen flick. Not one in which feelings, thoughts, idioms, and milieus are questioned, but instead, one that simply is, in all of its disdainful banality and meaninglessness. Life, that is. “Twinni or Jolly, I don’t give a shit,“ grunts one of the girls to her mother on the telephone when the mother asks about which ice cream she should bring her. “Tschusch,” she says, as goodbye. Weber’s short film is radical because it does not even offer anything to contrast the stale, middle-class socio-hygienic fug that can always be sniffed when cinema attempts to deal with teens. Instead, it simple ignores it. Some twin Pop is a gut film. In the post credits, the director thanks “every heartbeat that drowns out the brain.” One could call it pre-intellectual innocence: A primal state of narrative cinema, as though teleported here from an estranged past. With any luck, Lisa Weber, who is still quite youthful herself, will never forget this innocence. Let’s hope her films remain just as free and brazen and lost in themselves as Some Twin Pop. That would be a windfall for Austrian cinema. And anyway, totally awesome, or something like that.
(Markus Keuschnigg)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt