Modern day fairy tales don’t include princes and white horses anymore, unless as a prop perhaps in a carefully composed video. Who needs Prince Charming when you can be a successful influencer and live a life filled with online love? Girl Gang, selected for DOX:Award Competition, tells the captivating story of a girl’s dream come true, but whether it’s a happy ending is a matter of opinion.
86 percent of girls who are interviewed want to become an influencer. 80 percent of all brands worldwide rely on influencers for their advertising. This is the tale of a girl who is living that dream: the German Leonie, the only child (at least we don’t see any other children around) of an ambitious couple. Ambitious in the sense they want everything for their Leonie, a girl who, when the film starts, is on the brink of becoming a very much sought after influencer.
With over 300,000 followers she is doing fine, but with a little extra work and a little more authenticity, she could make her following grow and land some very lucrative deals.
Girl Gang is as addictive as Leonie’s Instagram posts and TikTok videos which have hundreds and thousands of girls glued to their screens, watching every (extensively practised) move that Leonie makes. It starts with footage of a delirious crowd of young girls who are waiting for their favourite influencer. The girls are a literal army of love, fitted out in uniform clothes with helmets of long sleek hair.
Filmmaker Meures has been following Leonie for two years with the same intensity as her online followers. They seemed to have had unlimited access to the family home as the influencer’s career takes off and she and her parents are swept away by a wave of fame and fortune. They go everywhere with her and record all her activities, including the listless hanging around on the bed, swiping away in search of inspiration for yet another post.
It is fascinating to see how the fourteen-year-old girl knows all there is to know about life online. She has the lamp, the tripod, the hair, the clothes, the smile and the words. And her followers eat up what she serves them from her makeshift studio. We follow the parents as they decide to take management of Leonie into their own hands with mountains of money looming on the horizon. The exact conversation about this impactful decision is presented as just a part of everyday life, but the consequences are huge.
While Leonie and her parents polish up their lives in front of camera, we get to know Melanie, a thirteen year old with an obsessive love for Leoobalys, as Leonie goes by online. She dreams of one day meeting her idol (maybe her own version of that white horsed prince) and she’s over the moon when her (single) mother lets her have more screen time. Not the seventeen hours she had before, but at least a good twelve hours.
Enough to be able to start a fan account and send Leonie plenty of (unrequited) modern day loveletter equivalents – dms (direct messages) and comments.
Although they never explicitly say it, from the way the story is built up and edited it would seem that Meures doesn’t exactly condone Leonie’s crazy lifestyle. The camera captures a lot of bickering between the parents, and between them and Leonie. She might be a star online and making money for all of them, but she is also a teenager who can’t be bothered to answer parental questions in civil fashion.
There is no footage of the girl with friends or going to school, so we don’t know if she has a social life offline. Now all we see is her smiling, playing, dancing and promoting herself in front of the lens, and being obnoxious and grumpy as soon as the shot is over. And there are a lot of scenes of the girl promoting endless amounts of product, all invented to make you look anything but real.
Just like Leonie, and maybe for the sake of the storyline, Melanie also seems a rather one dimensional character: the insecure fangirl with a grey life and nothing going for her. It is sad and gripping to see her reaction when she discovers her heroine in a store, behind a window: she screams, ‘It’s her!’ When it seems she won’t be making it to an event where she’d be able to meet Leonie, she’s in hysterics and sheds real tears – online.
Girl Gang feels like a feature film in the way the story develops, including crazy plot changes and a lot drama. It is disturbing and very insightful to watch Leonie and her family get lost in a world of constructed images. Maybe they would like to get out but they’re in too deep. They have to get to the next post, the next ten thousand followers, the next big contract, so they can polish and perfect their images even more. It is a disheartening yet captivating fairy tale, with an unexpected glimmer of hope sparked by the real Cinderella of this story – Melanie.
Switzerland, 2022, 98 mins
Language: German (English subtitles)
Producers: Christian Frei, Susanne Regina Meures
Production: Christian Frei Filmproduktion GmbH, SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen
Cinematography: Susanne Regina Meures
Editing: Katja Dringenberg
Sales: Rise and Shine World Sales
