When did teenage movies get so good?
It used to be enough to get a bunch of sassy teenagers involved in lousy high school adventures, with all the feelings always seeming two or three sizes too big, lending the whole thing its own comedy.
If cool sayings and easy-going music were added, the "cult film" status was not far away, a kind of universal amnesty for the most flippant coming-of-age clothes that seemed appropriate to an age when puberty from just cuddly children seethed hormonal volcanoes power.
"Teenage Angst" was banished from this world.
How playful and lyrical, enchantingly exaggerated and yet sensitive the collision of the really big emotions in young people's lives can be staged is now shown by Josephine Decker with her directorial stroke "Über mir der Himmel" on Apple TV+.
Decker has recently emerged with the creatively brimming productions Madeline's Madeline (2018) and Shirley (2020), the former an experimental drama about a lonely teenage girl caught up in theatrical play and the latter a film adaptation of a novel about the up Ghost story writer Shirley Jackson.
"Above me the sky" is also based on a novel whose author, Jandy Nelson, also wrote the screenplay.
In terms of content, it is again a teenage drama, but one that, despite all the tragedy, celebrates the imagination and hope of youth.
The plot is simple enough to fit into a few lines, and that's not a bad thing about the movie.
Seventeen-year-old Lennie Walker (Grace Kaufman), a gifted musician, has lost her beloved, soulmate, and heart disease sister.
Neither the encouragement of the family nor the music (alone) helps her over the grief;
only the blossoming of an equally powerful feeling, the first great love in all its exuberance, makes her able to live with the loss.
Lennie's parallel approach to her sister's grieving boyfriend (Pico Alexander), two sinking people clinging to each other, causes some emotional escapades from confusion to feelings of guilt to jealousy.
Music as an intimate initiation experience
First love, as the film shows, does not always have to be about furtive kisses (which also exist here).
Together with the pretty young musician Joe Fontaine (Jacques Colimon), whom Johann Sebastian Bach had already comforted over an earlier disappointment, the mourner lying in the grass listens to "Air on the G String", perhaps the most famous baroque melody of all (actually only one sentence from Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3), which has lost none of its magic.
Lennie, too, feels as if this wonder music recognizes her deep down.
The composition absorbs all her longings to transform it into blossoming beauty and jubilant love, which finds visual expression in a blissful, baroque vision of the dancing rose garden.
Above the two of them, plugged into Lennie's cell phone together, just the wide open sky:
Bach beats Richard Sanderson's "Reality," which in "La Boum" similarly poured directly into a teenage soul through headphones.
Caressed by the music, the enraptured find their way back to paradise, an intimate initiation experience.
"Did we just have sex?" asks a distraught Joe.