‘Ginger & Rosa’ will strike a chord with ’60s-era generation
Coming of age movies would seem to have worn out their welcome among the aging moviegoers of America, but when great ones come along, like “Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “An Education,” “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Lore,” the Film Forum faithfully steps up, and we have never lacked for viewers.
The latest entry in this perennially beguiling category is “Ginger & Rosa,” director Sally Potter’s closely observed drama set in early 1960’s pre-swinging London, when the streets were thronged with Ban the Bomb protestors, and the Cuban Missile Crisis filled the headlines.
Swept up in the excitement and anxiety are two hip teenagers, Ginger and Rosa, best friends all their lives (literally, they were born on the same day).
Redheaded Ginger (Elle Fanning, Dakota’s younger sister) is the agitated, earnest one, still under the sway of her charismatic peacenik father (Alessan- dro Nivola), and starting to revolt against her mother in all the ways that come so naturally and horribly to teenage girls.
Ginger writes poetry, hangs out with her doting gay godfathers (Oliver Platt and Timothy Spall) and their radical feminist friend from the States (a tough-talking, sympathetic Annette Bening).
Rosa (Alice Englert) is sexier, more careless, more isolated and maybe more ready to take risks. Ginger loves her dearly. But something will arise between them, a private crisis to be sure, but to Ginger, it is as unthinkable and catastrophic as the mushroom cloud that dominates her dreams.
“Potter has a profound gift for deeply felt, ideasdriven, visually stunning yet nuanced cinema,” says the Denver Post. This movie, says the Boston Globe, “is about adolescence as a state of absolute idealism and absolute self-absorption — a time when there’s no difference between the world’s calamities and one’s own. In Fanning, Potter has found the perfect vessel, and the miracle is that the actress doesn’t even seem to be trying. She just is.”
In this “ardent and intelligent” film, “Fanning shows a nearly Streepian mixture of poise, intensity and technical precision. It is frightening how good she is and hard to imagine anything she could not do,” raves the New York Times.