THE WEEK FILM: LADY BIRD
Christine refuses the name given to her, to use one that has been chosen: Lady Bird. He hates Sacramento, where nothing happens, and dreams of New York. In the struggle to assert their choices, the unemployed father assists her, but not the mother nurse, worried about her future.
Under the guise of the story of indie area formation, Greta Gerwig, making her directorial debut in solitude, creates a generational and universal work, capable of communicating beyond the cultural barriers.
Where colleague and mentor Noah Baumbach favors an intellectually refined New York context, Gerwig looks to his past in the province, modeling the autobiographical experience on the features of Lady Bird.
Lady Bird is a difficult girl who feels like a prisoner in Sacramento. Obliged to attend a Catholic school, to cultivate unsatisfactory friendships, to see in front of him the opportunity to participate in the cultural verve of the distant East Coast.
Lady Bird seems to foresee all the obligatory narrative passages of contemporary coming of age, but each of these presents a particularity that makes it irreducible to homologation. Stereotypes are often overturned and there is never a shadow of rhetoric or consoling sentimentality. Gerwig tells his adolescence without sweetening anything, giving only the impression of keeping the most amusing or dramatic episodes. To do this he relies on an increasingly surprising performer, the 23-year-old Saoirse Ronan, a miracle of ductility and transformism already observed in the recent Brooklyn.
The influence of Solondz and Baumbach cinema permeates the entire work; Gerwig, though aware of what the lexicon of the coming of age indie is, provides a new and irreverent version, and not only for the female point of view. New York, for example, a promised land of intellectual achievement, proves above all a place inhabited by subjects so preoccupied with being cool that they become more empty and impersonal than youngsters from the provinces. Following one's passions, and meeting one's own disappointments, can lead to a paradoxical reconciliation with one's rejected identity, with those roots that one ignored to love. We are in front of something more than a simple training story, with at least two masterly interpretations. Next to Ronan is Laurie Metcalf, in the role she deserves for decades: a loving and impossible mother,
Riccardo Supino