Strangely Socialised

It’s an absolute crime that I didn’t go see this movie when it was first released. (And it was, in fact, widely released in theatres in Canada, thank you very much.) No matter what personal horrors were going on in my life at the time, I should’ve scraped together the pennies and found the time and gone. I’d heard it was good, and it was better than I’d heard.

Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald are the social outcasts of the school, and largely by choice, rejecting everything superficial that their parents and their school seem to stand for. But promises and pacts made to each other as children are hard to hold up at the onset of adulthood.

The film relies on a parallel between lycanthropy and the onset of menstruation, and a very solid one at that, keeping it’s focus on change — on the ways that the body and personality and social interactions change. Ginger, one year older than her sister Brigitte, is bitten by a beast that has been terrorizing her suburb and begins these changes all at once. Her body blossoms, her period starts, she develops a taste for tearing things apart and starts to grow a tail. Brigitte is left behind.

The parallels that are drawn are overt, but except on a few occasions don’t feel particularly heavy-handed. The film is a feminist film and does not make any effort to hide that fact, but it is also a genre horror film and succeeds on that level too. One scene that works particularly well in both arenas is when a boy who Ginger has slept with suddenly starts peeing blood — an unsettling sight, and certainly something that boys never see where girls have to deal with it for a good portion of their lives. He is, unsurprisingly, completely freaked out by this.

One of the strongest parts of the movie, beyond its basic construction, is the performance of the two leads, Emily Perkins and Katherine Isabelle, as Brigitte and Ginger respectively. They raise the film far above the standard teen horror fare that is so prevalent these days.

Also strong are Mimi Rogers and John Bourgeois as the girls’ out-of-touch parents, and Kris Lemche as the drug dealer/botanist/accomplice to Brigitte in helping to find a cure for Ginger’s disease. (I spent much of the film trying to remember where I’d seen him before, then had a truly duh moment when I looked it up and realized he plays Cute God on Joan of Arcadia.)

The ending, which has been derided by many people who otherwise enjoyed the movie, was to me one of the most powerful moments in it. Ginger has already killed at least four people, and is advancing on her sister who in one hand holds a knife and in the other holds a syringe with the cure. Ginger pounces, and it’s the knife that ends up in her side, not the syringe.

The film opened, in part, with a montage of the girls playing out death scenes for a class assignment, and ends in much the same way. There was no way to a happy ending here, no way to undo the trauma of everything that had happened. I didn’t see the ending coming, but I was very satisfied with it in a way that I’m not with the usual American-style happy ending.

Highly, highly recommended.

Although I saw this in the theatre when it was released, and had plenty to say about it at the time, to anyone I could pin down long enough to listen, it’s taken me until now to get it down. Maybe because I borrowed the DVD from my mother a couple weeks ago and have watched the movie four times since then (though it commanded my full attention on none of them) and the movie is fresh in my mind.

If asked, I would say the recent movie that A Beautiful Mind is most similar to is Moulin Rouge.

You see, A Beautiful Mind was a source of controversy on a number of levels when it was released, one of which was the fact that it was not an accurate depiction of mental illness, schizophrenia in particular. My contention is that it was never meant to be an accurate depiction of schizophrenia on a literal level, but was meant to reach viewers on a more gut level, to make them feel what John Nash was feeling, to make them go through the same confusion as he did when told that the things he was seeing and interacting with weren’t real.

In Moulin Rouge, the songs in the movie weren’t meant to be accurate to the period. They were contemporary to the viewer, just as period music would have been contemporary to the characters, to make viewers feel the same sense of familiarity and excitement that the characters did. Both techniques were about the effect on the audience, making the experience authentic.

That’s the real strength of A Beautiful Mind, because I think it really does that. I think it really takes its viewers along for the mental illness ride. It’s not a particularly complex movie otherwise, it doesn’t explore many facets of Nash’s personality that are in the book the movie is based on. I certainly don’t think it’s deserving of all the recognition it has received, espeically in terms of acting and direction, but it’s very good for what it is, and some very effective choices were made when it was produced.

Going to a midnight showing at a Gay and Lesbian Film Festival is different than going to the multiplex to see a movie. I’ll say that right up front, because the audience you’re in changes the way you see a movie. Being one of about six women in a sold-out theatre of mostly gay men seeing a movie about the world of gay pornography, it definitely changes things.

So I suspect part of the reason I liked that movie was because of the great vibe of the audience.

And I did like it, at least most of it. It was clever and funny and even touching at times. It didn’t shrink away from the ugly things, but it balanced them with goodish things as well. It was blatantly sexual, yes, but that’s not really a minus for me.

The performances, well, I wasn’t expecting much so I wasn’t disappointed. But they weren’t outright bad, which is something. I had fun watching the movie and that’s the important thing.

But the ending … the ending was a great ending, for a different movie. I don’t know where the hell it came from, and though it tied up a couple of threads that were introduced earlier on in the movie, it just didn’t fit at all. It had a different look, a different tone, a different everything than the rest of the film. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it.

And I have a huge crush on Guinevere Turner. That helped.