Director Greta Gerwig honours motherdaughter dynamics

GRETA GERWIG LISTS The 400 Blows and Amarcord as her favourite coming-of-age films. Like most in the genre, they depict stories of boys discovering a sense of personhood as they mature into young men. As Gerwig puts it, onscreen portrayals of young girls on the brink of womanhood are usually about the female character’s “viability as a romantic partner.”

Lady Bird, the actress and writer’s solo directorial debut, is a refreshing alternative. It tells the story of an endearingly rebellious pink-haired senior determined to get out of her northern California Catholic high school and move to “where culture is.”

Although Gerwig did attend a Catholic girls school in Sacramento, she’s quick to brush off the idea that Lady Bird is autobiographical. “I wasn’t like that; I never made anyone call me by a different name, I wasn’t particularly out there,” she says. “I was a rule-follower and I liked gold stars. I was kind of a people pleaser.”

Saoirse Ronan’s brilliantly played Lady Bird does, however, act on the impulses Gerwig ignored as a teenager. “I made a heroine that I wish I could have been,” she says. “Not a perfect heroine, but one who was living out some fantasy for me.”

Given the lack of other femaledriven teen movies to draw inspiration from, Gerwig cites documentary Grey Gardens as one of the works that most influenced Lady Bird. She calls it the “best mother-daughter movie I’ve ever seen,” praising the Maysles brothers’ “perfectly captured dynamic of the same fights, the same stories, the same circling of the same issues.”

Gerwig’s film is, at its heart, also a mother-daughter story. It ditches traditional rom-com tropes to instead examine the overly critical, often hurtful, and unconditionally loving dynamic shared only by mothers and daughters. And while the story may be fictional, the characters onscreen feel real.

“They’re complicated, they’re interesting, they’re prickly, they’re loving, they’re jerks, they’re heroes, they’re everything,” Gerwig says of the women in her life. “Cinema should reflect that.”

“They’re complicated, they’re interesting, they’re prickly, they’re loving, they’re jerks, they’re heroes. Cinema should reflect that.”