A Young Girl's Journey Into the Big World by witsquash
Written: 1/26/2024
Films Reviewed:
- The Sweet East
- Directed by Sean Price Williams
- Seen: 12/25/2023 at IFC Center
- Poor Things
- Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
- Seen: 12/30/2023 at Prytania New Orleans
The Sweet East follows a high school girl that wanders off during
her class trip to Washington D.C. On her journey she encounters
Q-Anon shooters, trust fund crust punks, erudite neo-nazis, wokester
filmmakers, and gay Islamists. Each tribe is received with the
characteristic teenager's dismissive eyeroll. Yet, she is also a sponge,
absorbing and reflecting the disparate ideologies and lifestyles. When
pressed for details, she's as likely to retell the story of an earlier
character as her own as she is to reveal anything about herself.
Some of the film's most interesting parts take place while she is living
with a neo-nazi academic in a very Lolita-esque situation. There is a
tension throughout the movie that constantly has you asking "will she
get raped?". This is an interesting aspect that is not present in a
coming-of-age type adventure starring a young man. Not that we see this
fear in the character herself.
Overall The Sweet East is a fun and unexpected trip.
Poor Things is another take on "young girl discovers the world". Instead
of using a teenager's youth and cynicism as the vehicle for discovery,
Lanthimos implants a baby's head into the body of an adult woman that
committed suicide. Suspension of disbelief is achieved by setting the
movie in a Victorian steampunk world. Lanthimos is no stranger to
contriving hypothetical societies in order to expose something about our
own. In Dogtooth, we take the idea that society is dangerous and family
is safe to the extreme. We meet a family where the children have never
left the house. So we have Poor Things where we imagine the life of an
infant-in-a-woman's body, raised in isolation from the world. Unline in
Dogtooth, the story is about what happens when the child leaves the
house. The woman-child, Bella, goes through a rapid maturation without
the baggage of society's mores. She has an adolescence of uninhibited
sex, travels the world, has youthful ideals, grows her intellect, and
grinds out a living as a prostitute. All the while, men try to control
her.
The movie is ugly. I'm not particularly interested in the steampunk
aesthetic to begin with and so these elements were mostly uninteresting.
The overworld that places her during her travels is a computer generated
mess. Overall, it's very unappealing visually. While their are many
parts of young adult development shown in the movie, the predominant
part are the many explicit scenes of sex and nudity. So you have a movie
that is purporting to show a strong woman pushing back against men's
control in society, but this thwarting of control seems to come down to
having sex and not being ashamed about it.
There were elements of humor, Mark Ruffalo plays a hilarious suitor,
nudity is generally nice, but I was left unimpressed. For me, this is
Lanthimos' first miss. Sean Price Williams delivers a more fun,
relevant, and attractive film.
