Fräulein Schmetterling (2005)

Seventeen-year-old Helene Raupe, who can already fly in her imagination, lives with her six-year-old sister Asta in an old tenement district of Berlin. When their father, a tobacco shop owner, dies, his shop is closed, even though Helene had always run it together with him. The tenement district is threatened with demolition. An aunt from Potsdam promises to take care of the two sisters, but after a short time she returns to Potsdam. The sisters cannot live with her because, allegedly, the aunt has little room. Helene now has to look after her sister. Although Helene imagines a life as a flight attendant or model in her dreams, district employee Himmelblau finds her a job as a fishmonger in Berlin’s market hall, where she fails. When the shop has scarce smoked eels for sale, Helene cannot cope with the rush of customers, makes mistakes with the accounts, and is eventually fired. Himmelblau then places her in an exclusive fashion shop, but her blunt manner drives the customers away. She is fired again and retreats into a world of her own, where she is a successful saleswoman with many friendly, satisfied customers. Youth welfare officer Frau Fertig visits Helene to check on the sisters’ well-being. She is horrified to learn that the aunt is not looking after the girls and that Helene has lost her job for the second time. Helene, however, finds a new job as a bus conductor and thereby avoids being sent to a home, as had been threatened. In bus driver Kubinke, Helene finds a fatherly friend, and she enjoys the work, too. But when she gets into an argument with a passenger who refuses to buy a ticket, Helene voluntarily gives up her job as a conductor. The passenger is the young boxer she is unhappily in love with, but whom she recently rejected for being too forward. On her eighteenth birthday, Helene and her sister are invited by their aunt to a circus, where Helene watches, fascinated, as a mime catches the sun in his performance. A little later, she has to answer to Frau Fertig again, who is hostile toward her. Frau Fertig requires Helene to resume her work as a bus conductor. Asta has to move in with their aunt in Potsdam. Helene has been assigned an apartment in a new housing development. Excavators now move in on the old tenement where Helene lived for a long time. When Helene visits the familiar surroundings one last time, she finds her sister Asta in their old apartment; Asta has run away from the aunt’s household. The two girls think about their situation and whether the authorities around them are acting rightly or wrongly. They leave the apartment and go to the circus, where they see the mime onstage again. That evening, he chooses Helene as his partner in a performance, and together they reenact the events of the past few weeks: Helene’s various jobs and her struggle with bureaucracy. At the end, the mime gives Helene a sunflower, and the girl feels liberated. The sisters leave the circus tent with the mime and hand out sunflowers to the sour-faced passersby, who suddenly look friendly. The film ends with the off-screen remark, “That’s impossible!”