The acting in Leonie Krippendorff’s tale of sexual awakening is outstanding, as a girl comes out during a hot
Berlin summer
This is nothing to do with Ron Howard’s movie about Don Ameche being rejuvenated by
aliens. German director Leonie Krippendorff has created a coming-of-age awakening in the 2018 summer of love, with swimming-pool rapture, yearning bedroom reveries and rooftop party scenes in the Kotti Kreuzberg, Berlin’s Kottbusser Tor district. There are also some noodling YA-style video-journaling inserts, which are an acquired taste. It’s a bit derivative and the metaphor in the title is right on the nose – but Cocoon is also seductive and well-acted.
Fourteen-year-old Nora (Lena Urzendowsky) nerdishly keeps caterpillars in jars in her bedroom, the sort of childish hobby that many people of her age have junked in favour of
Instagram. She hangs out with her older sister Jule (Lena Klenke) and Jule’s friend Aylin (Elina Vildanova) who tolerate her, just about. Nora and Jule are pretty much abandoned to their own devices by their alcoholic mum Vivienne (Anja Schneider), who is bleary to the point of being comatose, but a birthday gift she receives from an old friend hints at a more complex intellectual past: Judith Butler’s book Bodies That Matter.