‘I’ll Be Gone in June’ review: A weak but atmospheric drama that follows a German student to New Mexico in 2001

German teenager Frannie (newcomer Naomi Kuzma) arrives in New Mexico to spend the 2001-2002 school year at a Las Cruces high school, living with a local family, just before the September 11 terrorist attacks in writer-director Katarina Reveles’ debut film.

Even if you didn’t know that this was inspired by Rivilis’s own teenage experience as an exchange student that day, you could probably guess from the way that nothing really happens, aside from making friends, seeing places, and insignificantly breaking hearts. However, as befits a film supported in part by Wim Wenders’s road movies, this one uses an eclectic soundtrack, strokes of backlighting, and a magic cinematic clock to help capture the strange feeling of being a European outsider in a strange land of enchantment in the West. Revelis also draws confident, natural performances from its non-professional cast, who largely improvised their dialogue, making this suitable for festivals with younger audiences.

Although Franny doesn’t say much, she is her eyes and ears, watching everything closely from the moment she arrives in Albuquerque to meet her host family. But Frannie is not naive, having grown up in East Germany until the fall of the Wall as well as possessing a natural wit and street smarts, she soon realizes that things are not quite right at the home of the Garcias, her host family. While the parents, Tony and Eve Garcia, seem nice at first, Frannie soon discovers that they are less open to cultural exchange than one might expect. Additionally, the fact that they took in foster child Patty has less to do with kindness and more to do with greed because they receive income for it from social services. They even left Frannie, Patty, and their daughter, Robin, in the car one afternoon so they could go to the casino for hours.

After Frannie finds out that Eve seems to be confiscating some of her possessions, possibly to sell them, and they fight over who to befriend, Frannie goes to live with another family. This time the mother works at Frannie’s high school and they seem to have more money judging by the presence of a swimming pool in the backyard. Best of all, they keep Frannie on a leash for a very long time and sort of disappear from the movie after a while as Frannie, when not at school, spends more and more time with the other teens.

Among her new friends is Sam (Bianca Dumais), a love interest about the same age as Franny who has developed a reputation for having promiscuous sex around town that doesn’t seem deserved. (It’s hinted that she may be a victim of abuse.) Franny quickly develops a friendship circle that includes the kids who like to party but seem too nice, while she occasionally hangs out with her more straight-talking but kind German classmate Ida (Rebecca Schultz, who appeared in one of Revelice’s shorts).

But the most exciting new relationship is with Elliot (David Flores), a handsome boy with hair and bones like 90s Johnny Depp, who sings in a band and works in a restaurant where he serves customers while wearing skates. The fact that the adults disapprove of him because he is said to be using drugs makes him even more attractive to Frannie. After a romantic trip to the white desert sands and passionate kisses (filmed with a constantly rotating camera, and very nice video), Franny becomes completely infatuated and soon begins to deject when he fails to call her back. He’s a teenage boy, afraid of commitment, and completely oblivious to the fact that she’s probably the most interesting person he’ll ever meet.

As the months pass, thanks to much less southwesterly weather than in Frannie’s hometown of Brandenburg, she becomes accustomed to the strange ways and customs of small-town American life, which at this point is full of the patriotism that has swept the country in the wake of the attacks. Revellis manages to convey how strange it is for the protagonist/alt without condescending to the “stupid” Americans who barely realize what’s going on in the next county over, let alone Europe and the Middle East. A scene in a high school civics class in which students discuss retaliatory invasions abroad, half paying attention and half blinking, suggests how difficult a battle teachers face to break through apathy and boredom — and this was before social media.

In fact, the film becomes a nostalgic glimpse into a teenage way of life that has all but disappeared, when kids talked to each other and spent more time in real life and didn’t spend every waking minute with their eyes glued to screens. Those were the days.