MOVIE REVIEW
“Ginger & Rosa” Grade: B
Starring Elle Fanning, Alice Englert, Christina Hendricks and Alessandro Nivola. Directed by Sally Potter
Rated PG-13 for mature disturbing thematic material involving teen choices and for language. 1 hour, 30 minutes.
Bottom line: Bleak and powerful film
By Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle
Sally Potter’s twin interests — in grand world movements and in the grand internal movements in people lives — are effectively brought to bear in “Ginger & Rosa,” her best film of the decade.
It tells the story of two teenage girls in London, best friends since birth, as they go through a series of personal crises, while the world outside has a crisis of its own — a big one. Something to do with missiles and Cuba, Kennedy and Khrushchev. The year is 1962, and as things stand, there might not be a 1963.
Philosophy is, at its core, the study of how one should live one’s life in the face of death. So an international crisis like this makes everyone a philosopher. Everyone is forced to assess what they value, what they want, and what they consider to be important. Ginger (Elle Fanning), the main focus of the movie, chooses political activism; Rosa chooses an immersion in pleasure. Ginger’s mother (Christina Hendricks) is too responsible and too in despair to choose anything, while her dangerously charming husband (Alessandro Nivola) becomes reinforced in his determination to leave her.
You can see “Ginger & Rosa” as a critique of 1960s hedonism. Potter depicts its flowering, while presenting it, in hindsight, as a philosophical dead-end. But to describe the movie in this way makes it sound too dry. There are big emotions at work in “Ginger & Rosa,” and the performances are exceptional. Elle Fanning, as Ginger, not only sounds English, but her whole manner is suffused with Englishness, so that at moments she seems like a young Judi Dench. She and Hendricks, as her mother, go to some bleak and wrenching places in “Ginger & Rosa” and return with the best work of their lives.
