Ginger & Rosa

A small movie for perhaps an even smaller audience, Ginger & Rosa is a coming-of-age/sexual awakening tale of two close girlfriends growing up in London in 1962 at the height of the frantic and worrisome Cuban Missile Crisis.

Ginger (an exceptional Elle Fanning) has found her life turned upside down when her squabbling parents – the put-upon, under-appreciated, one-time artist mother (Mad Men's Christina Hendricks) and the esteemed, bohemian, philandering professor father (Alessandro Nivola) – decide to separate and her closest friend Rosa (Alice Englert) could care less as she is more interested in wearing eye shadow and nail polish to impress the random teenage boy.

To become more active and to distract herself from her own life's unraveling situation (thanks, Rosa!), Ginger takes on the cause of nuclear disarmament after being swayed by the conversations of her mother's political activist friends (O. Platt, T. Spall and A. Bening). No matter the bigger obstacles Ginger takes upon herself, the various actions of her family and friends are what ultimately threaten the young girl and her well-being.

Ginger & Rosa is a decent film that will not appeal to a mass audience. It is a slow-moving character-study of the film's strongest character, Ginger. Luckily Rosa -- a character who is very hard to like from the get-go (selfish) -- isn't really featured enough to merit her name in the title. Some will see the film as ponderous as the young Ginger strives to find reason and purpose; but she is a realistic character and Fanning is subtle in some scenes and fantastic in others. (THIS is the more-talented Fanning sister and I have felt this way since Somewhere).

I tried to explain the "feel" of the film to a friend the other day and I said it was much like placing a pot of water on the stove for it to boil. It is a pot of water sitting on a stove (exciting!) ... just sitting there as it simmers while we get a bubble here and a bubble there! When it finally hits the boiling point -- watch out! -- because it could boil over!

I bought this DVD months ago, but before I could watch it my dog ran off with it and buried it somewhere. I finally found it the other day (remarkably preserved) and read the DVD box to refresh my memory. Well the description doesn't exactly leap out at you: "Two teenage girls dream of lives bigger than their mothers' frustrated domesticity as the Cold War meets the sexual revolution..." Yawnsville, right? I was tempted to give it back to my dog. But I'm glad I didn't.

Right off the bat, "Ginger & Rosa" is an absolute feast for the eyes. I have no idea what special filters, lenses & lighting techniques were used to achieve it, but writer/director Sally Potter puts us in a hazy, nostalgic state while maintaining crisp shots and vivid colors. She used Elle Fanning's red hair to the fullest, complimenting it with an equally glowing, autumn-like palette in the background. Contrasting scenes, the colder ones, seemed bleached & blue, bringing to mind the memorable Beatles lyric "If the sun don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain." Why am I harping on colors so much? Because, although subtle, the colors are what bring this film to life, and like my review title suggests, you can take a snapshot of any scene and hang it on your wall as art.

The story is equally captivating, not in a bang-em-up action way but in a quiet, uneasy "Catcher in the Rye" sort of way. Ginger (Elle Fanning) is reminiscent of the iconic Holden Caufield, a character with deep sensitivities coming to grips with feelings of confusion toward a human world full of hypocrisy and apathetic phonies. In "Catcher", Holden was obsessed with the impossible task of protecting all the children of the world. In "Ginger & Rosa", Ginger is obsessed with saving the world from a nuclear holocaust. As the missile threat looms with no rationality from political powers, and as her home life becomes increasingly troubled with no rationality from parental authority, she starts to come apart at the seams.

Elle Fanning truly knocks this one out of the park. I haven't seen this sort of emotional performance from a young actor in ages, if ever. Everyone did a great job of acting, but it was Elle who really took the cake. Her final scene is so powerful it makes you wonder how she conjured up that sort of emotion and if she can ever do it again. I'll definitely be following her career to see.

If you like artistic films with powerful visuals that transport you to a nostalgic, not-too-distant past, films like the Italian masterpieces "I'm not Scared" (2003) and "Denti" (2000) by Gabrielle Salvatores, maybe "The Squid and the Whale" (2005) by Noah Baumbach, another 60s British coming of age flick "An Education" (2009), and dare I mention the Spanish masterpiece "Spirit of the Beehive" (1973), then you'll really like this. Don't let your dog run off with this DVD.

It's 1962 London. Ginger (Elle Fanning) gets fixated on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and is inseparable from her best friend Rosa (Alice Englert). She has a dysfunctional family. Her mother (Christina Hendricks) is disconnected from her daughter. And his father Roland (Alessandro Nivola) is completely disconnected with societal norms.

Writer/director Sally Potter is using a minimalist approach to filmmaking. It is quite slow early on. It's actually tough to see the lack of connection and the naive talk. Elle Fanning is very compelling as the lost little girl. I do wish that the film could get going much faster. Once it gets going. Elle gives the best performance I've seen her done as an older performer.

Every character is lost here. The fact that they're so adamant of their righteousness just elevates the frustration. The only person with a clue is the doctor at the jail. The family break down in the end is disturbing.

GINGER & ROSA is a quiet, relatively uneventful coming-of-age tale about two British girls growing up during the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those who want a conventional storyline with plenty of fast action will, understandably, find it rather dull: GINGER & ROSA is driven almost entirely by character, themes, and dialogue. Yet, there is an indescribable magic to this film. After a slow, uncertain start, GINGER & ROSA slowly hypnotizes its audience with very real characters and multiple issues. The "big" global issue of the "the Bomb" is juxtaposed very well with the "smaller" interrelationships between the characters.

Ginger, the protagonist, is an aspiring poet, and the film itself is structured a bit like a poem. It addresses the complexities of growing up, inseparable friendship, the pain that comes when something disrupts it, and many other things. As one who's battled with depression on and off for most of his life, I found GINGER & ROSA very illuminating about the nature of despair, melancholy, and all of that.

While intrigued, I still wondered for most of the first 80 or so minutes, "Where is all this supposed to be going?" Nothing terribly dramatic ever happens, but, like a good poem, the fine ending and resolution made me glad I'd stayed with it.

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, "Ginger and Rosa" is a complex tale of two adolescent girls, best friends from childhood, coming of age in early 1960s England.

Ginger, so named because of her flaming red hair, is the more socially awkward of the two, and it is she who has recently become obsessed with the threat of global nuclear annihilation. Rosa seems a bit more worldly and experimental overall, more willing to take a dip in that tantalizing pool known as adulthood with all the attended mysteries - and risks - it has to offer. This creates a bit of a problem for the two when Rosa becomes romantically involved with Ginger's handsome step dad who has recently separated from Ginger's mom.

Ginger struggles to find herself amidst the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ban the Bomb rallies and the tumultuous lives of the people around her. Failed marriages, unfulfilled lives, unreliable friendships - these become the preoccupations of a young girl who has the added concern of a world seemingly on the path to blowing itself up to deal with. Or is that broader concern just a convenient way for her to deflect and sublimate the pain brought on by her relationships with her mother, stepfather and best friend, not to mention the perfectly ordinary growing pains common to adolescence? Writer/director Sally Potter doesn't feel the need to answer that question, and one of the movie's strongest assets is that it doesn't deal with its subject matter and themes in black-and-white terms. It feels real precisely because it doesn't pigeonhole its characters or provide a neat, carefully planned-out narrative for the audience to follow. We're allowed to observe these people from an appropriate emotional distance and to render our own judgment - or lack of judgment - on them. They may be screwed up, but we see a lot of ourselves reflected in them, even if we don't care to fully admit it.

Elle Fanning turns in a remarkably self-assured performance as Ginger, and she receives excellent support from Alice Englert as Rosa, Alessandro Nivola as the step dad, and Christina Hendricks from "Mad Men" as her mom. Moreover, Timothy Spall, Oliver Platt and Annette Benning appear as unconventional but sympathetic neighbors who Greek-chorus their way through the film.