I feel very happy when a movie review actually does a decent job of getting to the point :-) So I translated this article from the German Newspaper ‘Süddeutsche Zeitung’ so you, my english speaking friends, could read it and rejoice. Yay!Â
(original article by Benedikt Frank:Â http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/film-ein-maedchen-verschwindet-1.2592143)Â
She’s your typical girl to fall for, but Margo is more complicated than the picture we first get to see in the Teenage romance movie ‘Margos Spuren’.
It sounds like a spell when Quentin says the girl’s name, the girl he instantly falls in love with: ‘Margo Roth Spiegelmann’. She walks in slow motion, like all girls you fall in love with in movies. She lives across the street now and she’s so cool, she doesn’t even get scared when the two kids find a dead body one day. Instead, she looks at it up close: strange, she thought dead peoples’ eyes were always closed.
But Quentin is shy, a scaredy cat, not one to sneak out the window at night like Margo to experience adventures, but rather one who clings to rules to deal with his insecurity. So he quietly admires her from a distance until the last year of high school.
If you’ve ever seen one teen movie, you’re guessing: Everything changes in the last year of high school and of all the years, it is the best one.
And that is the way it is in Jake Schreier’s movie based on John Green's novel. But 'Margos Spuren’ is not only a coming of age story and Margo doesn’t just fill the character of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the lively girl who appears and allows a guy to truly flourish.
Just when the movie gets going, Margo disappears. At first, that’s not a reason to be concerned, she’s been known to do these things. But Quentin, the one who saw her last, believes he can find her, believes Margo left him clues because she wants to be found by him. And suddenly the movie is more of a detective story than teenage romance.
The clues almost seem like John Greens personal advice to the viewers. In Margo’s room there’s a poster of Woody Guthrie with his trademark guitar and the writing on it ‘This machine kills fascists’. That sentence is also on the back of Green’s laptop which he sits behind when he explains literature and history to millions of viewers on YouTube. The clues lead to the poet Walt Whitman and from there to the paper towns, cities that only exist on paper maps to allow publishers to recognize copies of their maps.
Paper Towns is also the original title of the novel. It remains a mystery why the German translation talks about ‘plastic cities’.
A map is not the same thing as the scenery it represents. Slowly it becomes clear that Margo is also more complex than the idea about her that Quentin has in his head and the picture of her the movie shows at the beginning. Another genre-switch later (detective story turns road trip) many secure looking things start to falter.
Margos Spuren switches between euphoria and melancholy and still has a thoroughly positive message. John Green signs off in his videos with the sentence ‘Don’t forget to be awesome’. And the movie reminds us as well to be awesome and further, that everybody can be awesome: the loser, the dream girl, the shy ones and the runaway- because they are more than the idea that others have of them.Â
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