Ginger is a deadly serious teenager coming of age in London in the 1960’s at the height of the Cold War. Up till now she has done everything together with her best friend Rosa but as Ginger starts becoming a budding activist and a impassioned poet the girls start to drift apart. Unlike Ginger, Rosa has struggled through school and holds her mother in great disdain and also cannot shake off her bitterness about her father walking out on them she was still a baby. Ginger on the other hand worships Roland her father, a scruffy intellectual who had been imprisoned for being a pacifist, and she also patronizes her mother for giving up her own career as an artist to be a much put-upon housewife.
As Ginger grows she is encouraged to pursue her new bohemian ways by her two gay godfathers even though one earnestly entreats her ‘can’t you be a girl for a moment or two longer?’ Their best friend Bella, who is visiting from the US, is a strident feminist and she serves as the catalyst to edge Ginger on. This is all at the expense of the relationship between the two girls which sours when Rosa, who clearly has no ambitions to save the world, focuses instead on saving/seducing Roland, who has now finally left Natalie. She does this right in front of Ginger, and we know by now that it is not going to end well for any of them.
This is the latest movie written and directed by Sally Potter and after her last two extremely disappointing ones (‘Rage’ and ‘Yes’) shows that she is getting back to the form when she burst on to our screens back in ’92 with ‘Orlando’ and ‘The Tango Lesson’ in ’97. To bring her work so alive, she always manages to pull in such first rate actors although surprisingly enough for this slice of quintessential English life, very few of her cast were British. Ginger was stunningly played by Ellie Fanning : a veteran actress at 14 with some 13+ movies under her belt already. Likewise young Alice Englert in the less showy role of Rosa is the daughter of new Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion. Roland was played by Alessandro Nivola, the two gay godfathers by Oliver Platt and Timothy Spall, and Annette Benning was in the cameo role of Bella, and Jodhi May was cast as Rosa’s mother. Poor Christina Hendricks (‘Mad Men’) struggled so valiantly with her British accent that she (and you) couldn’t focus on her playing Natalie at all.
I was enthralled by Ms Potter’s attention to the most minute detail of the look and feel of this piece : she captured the mood of the country perfectly in that period in the heady 1960’s before we stopped worrying about the bomb and started making love instead. What was less agreeable was the overabundance of earnestness and the somewhat pseudo-sounding philosophising which started to drain one’s patience big time. It was both excessive and unnecessary.
Worth seeing though for Miss Fanning alone, and maybe (!) because Sally Potter movies are few and far between.
★★★★★★
Labels: British, drama, period drama
