I Believe in Unicorns

All teenage girls need to see this I Believe in Unicorns. Or for that matter, anyone who ever was a teenage girl needs to. Leah Meyerhoff somehow manages to capture the human condition so perfectly in this film. It shows the ugly little details of life and relationships that nobody bothers to do in most movies and leaves you with a gut wrenching feeling (but in a good way). That's what really sets it apart.

Natalia Dyer gives an extremely brave performance as Davina, a 16 year old girl juggling school, taking care of her mother with MS, and a new relationship with Sterling (Peter Vack), an older "bad boy". Sterling starts out as her "unicorn", but that starts to change as they become closer.

It's also beautifully shot, some of it on 16mm film which gives it a vintage, timeless feel. There is no use of modern technology throughout the entire film, which leaves you guessing whether it took place in the present day or some magic era that never existed. The stop motion sequences make it whimsical and fantastical.

Experience, indeed, defies representation or articulate expression. Just as a photograph only captures one shot of a smooth manifold aggregate of lived phenomena, so language can only restrictedly encapsulate vibrancy. But one'd hope that a sequence of such photographs enables one to peer into that share of moments, brightening up memory and trajectories of thoughts, absorbing anew the cultivating spectrum of lived emotions. Breathe.

The opening credits alone immediately capture the spirit of this pure coming-of-age masterpiece. Ignoring the excusable whiny music, it alone was already so great and lingering that one'd want to stop and muse. Submergence into water necessitates the synergy of the liquid water's flows with the likewise fluid and variedly current half-obscured memories of growth intertwined with decay. Stopping for an instance, retreating below the surface, divine Davina feels the impact of the past. It's her birthday, but she's not yet ready to face it. Brooding on the past can perhaps help, before lurching further into uncertain future terrains, that will eventually also continually expand the mind's horizons.

Film itself captures the process. An acoustic-visual artificial succession of events, melded with and moulded by memory, fantasy, by movements of objects that defy physical laws. Stop-motion and time-lapse show the productive capabilities of the unconscious factory, and the fragmentary apprehension of spacetime. Shades of lights correspond to different intensities. One traverses heterogenous planes, exploring natural strata, and sensing the world. The hair billows through the wind, the skateboard grinds across the concrete, the clouds, the grass, crops, trees, endless telephone wires, ... they all reverberate, grafted from their respective denotations to dance within the partial subjective perspectives, poetic experimentation and flows. Stream of consciousness.

Divine Davina is in a state of becoming. The creation of memories contrasts with the stagnancy and deterioration of her mother. Touching her mother instills stifling anxieties of death and decomposition, the limit of possibilities - "la forme et l'essence divine / De mes amours décomposés". She still has a life ahead, and hence must venture into those fairy tales and badlands.

Becoming the nomadic voyager, wandering about. Dreaming and playing. Feeling the full spectrum of emotions. The unicorn and the dragon. Multivariate and recombining flinches of desire, sadness, happiness, loneliness, abandonment, comfort, disappointment, surprise, danger, warmth, coldness, excitement, pain, pleasure, ... transitions between various intensive states and interactions with a significant other, who's active and feeling too, differently, but reciprocally, within a changeable complex relationship.

Finally one has to digest the trip, make time for thought. The past becomes another series of photographs, pages of diaries, details, conclusions, and material mementos. And then one continues on, indefinitely.

"There's so much I want to say. But I don't know where to start."

I am a guy, so I am not the target audience for this picture, because girls are. I dont necessarily dislike girly pictures, but this movie is nothing else but a total girly picture, without ever being really funny or really dramatic.

The good: beautiful photography. Good acting. Gentle, lovely story about a girl's first true love.

The bad: no real drama, no real spark or punch, it's all quite lovely and beautiful artsy to watch for sure, but lovely is all there is to it and I am definitely missing some real drama. But hey, I am a guy, and as I said before, I am not the audience this movie was made for. So take my review with a grain of salt, many other (female) reviewers loved this movie...

I Believe in Unicorns is a poetic and deeply intimate film. Its greatest achievement is how it conveys the loss of innocence as a teenage girl discovers womanhood/independence through a road-trip with her boyfriend. However, this newly discovered freedom seems to be just as disturbing as the home life she seeks to escape. Meyerhoff depicts through stop- motion and an effusive color-palette the POV/Internal life of our main character--Davina. There are unicorns, knights, princesses--it's a narrative of mythology to describe how her childlike internal world is trying to make sense of the looming chaos of her adult life.

This film does not depict the empowerment of love but is a cautionary tale for the relationships we chase when we are looking to escape our circumstances. And through this cyclone, we see Davina's mythological internal world crumble as her external one transforms.

This film is sophisticated and confident in its approach. It commits to one story/character- rather then a feature aiming to dizzy us with a multitude of sub-plots. The two stories can arguably be distilled to Davina's romance with Sterling and the adventures of her mythological internal world. As a result, you leave feeling you know this person like a best friend or a lover. (A testament to Natalia Dyer's acting).

This is a treat given cinema's ever-growing plague of saccharin and one-dimensional female characters. What you learn about Davina is not just magical--but it is terrifying. And the fact that Meyerhoff gives us such a close portrait of a teenage girl is nothing short of daring (things don't just boil down to getting the romantic interest and being happy--there is nightmare that looms from even chasing one)--from first sexual encounters (the squeaky awkwardness) to finding true love for an imaginary princess. This wide spectrum exists in Davina. I only look forward to meeting more of the characters Meyerhoff brings to life.

I Believe in Unicorns is a poignant, down-to-earth look at the complications of coming of age and young love. Having first seen this film when I was in my early teens, it emotionally affected me on a personal level and has carried with me throughout my high school years.

One of the film's strongest points is its aesthetic beauty. With gorgeous cinematography and inventive use of stop-motion, the film visually carries along like a dream, or somebody's hazy, nostalgic memories of a summer long ago. It sinks us deeper into Davina's fantasy world and lets us see the world through her naive, rose-colored glasses. Anybody who's a fan of cinematography will adore this movie.

Davina is an interesting character- shy and naive, perfectly portrayed by Natalia Dyer. She's caught up in her own fantasy world, which blinds her from the truth of her prince charming, Sterling. He becomes increasingly violent, up until the film's explosive end. The film doesn't shy away from showing Sterling gradually take advantage of Davina's naivety and purity, and we're given a raw, realistic look at abuse and the rough waters of youth. We're taught a cautionary tale along with Davina, and this film is an essential watch for any teenager.