Ginger & Rosa - A Review

There are few things as good as being alone in a movie theater, being completely alone is as social an experience as any. Ginger & Rosa is a British film directed by Sally Potter, which focuses of the tumultuous friendship between two girls, growing up during the start if the cold war and the Cuban missile crisis, and dealing with family struggles and the sexual revolution. Elle Fanning stars as Ginger, a young girl who has to deal with her parents divorce, and wanting to save the world for fear of a nuclear holocaust. Christina Hendricks stars as her mother, and Anette Bening as a friend of her godparents, and fellow activist, who acts as a mentor to Ginger.

The film is a period piece set in england during the sixties, and is beautifully shot, shunning the personally much loathed handheld 'shakycam' for a much smoother and more coherent style, capturing the weak english sunlight, and the bleakness of the era. The film despite being beautifully shot, has a disappointingly weak script, and despite the dialogue often being engaging and insightful, the film has an irritatingly rambling plot which despite being engaging in the moment often seems to be going nowhere, and is at times rambling and vague, with the plot seeming to be made up as it goes along, and with a frustrating lack of an overarching plot line or story arc, with most of the film being focused on character development rather than character development.

Elle fanning is a revelation in the title role, and despite being only fifteen, manages to add a gravitas to the role of Ginger, and manages to truly inhabit her, also taking on her accent with an almost 'Daniel Day Lewis' like aplomb, and playing the character with a subtlety which makes us truly believe in her, and experiencing her pain as if it were our own, leaving the audience bewildered and destabilized leaving the theater, feeling, like Ginger as if our world too is about to collapse, bring on the Oscars!

Overall Ginger and Rosa despite not being a bad film, is not a particularly good one either, and even the performances from Fanning, Hendricks and Bening are not enough to save this film from its rambling and vague plot, however Fanning's breakthrough performance alone means that despite this films many flaws, it is simply too beautiful and well acted to ignore. Rating: B+ (Fannings Performance: A+!)

Ginger: We had a dream, that we would always be best friends.