''Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento." words by Joan Didion that opens Gretta Gerwig's debut film Lady Bird.
Gerwig, also from Sacramento, known to audience for acting in films Frances Ha and 20th Century Woman brings us coming of age indie film. Although placed in a recognizable environment of teen genre, Lady Bird brings an intimate, character-oriented and realistic picture of adolescent life.
In the opening scene of the film, we see Christine "Lady Bird" (Saoirse Ronan) and her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) returning home after visiting Christine's potential college. Observing how protagonists share a pronounced number of physical attributes, we hear that they are mentally belonging to two opposite worlds. While Marion is a simple and modest person who enjoys the little things that life brings, Lady Bird wants to be a free spirit, to live the life, somewhere far away on the "east coast".
In the hearth of the debate, Lady Bird leaps out of the car on the move, after which we meet with Sacramento, a city in which there is nothing to experience. Unique suits in Catholic schools, two-storey houses with a large courtyard from American dreams and silences spoken by conservative environments, are the main features of this central town on the west coast. At the center of all this is the unbridled, slightly rebellious, artistic nineteenth-year-old Lady Bird, ready to ripen into a strong and independent woman.
NOT ANOTHER TEENAGE MOVIE
Lady Bird, unlike similar genre films, doesn't take as a central theme a performance at the end of the semester, a prom dance, a desire to enroll in a good college or the first sexual and love experiences. Yes, through the film it's possible to meet each of these topics individually, but they come along, while in the main narrative stream of the film we have a family battle with ripening.
Intermittent conversations that are echoing later in the film, the protagonist who always has a cunning response to all these cruel truths hidden by dialogues of secondary characters show that Gerwig is inspired by the work of Noah Baumbach. References to Baumbach's works, with which Gerwig had collaborated on several films, go further than the twisted scenario of closeness of character. Gerwig, using Baumbach's model, uses a gloomy, uniform environment, and limits the world of her film to shades of blue, white and pink to bring us closer to Lady Bird protagonist.
Gerwig doesn't copy this style blindly, but on the basis of what she knows from her previous collaborations she forms his own directorial expression. While with Baumbach it's not possible to see dirty streets or randomly chaotic rooms, Gerwig accepts the reality of the world and doesn't try to beautify it. The "dirty" reality penetrates the movie through the protagonist as a chaotic room that reflects the personality of its owner without ever having the opportunity to find out what exactly is in that room.
A particularly interesting feature of the movie is the installation of sound that often compensates for the ease of visual editing. The sounds flow from one scene to another, which improves the dynamics of the film, and so what was the musical background in one scene is actually the music the protagonist listens to in the next one.
Representation of church school staff is the place where the film is surprisingly brilliant. Pushing into the private lives of priests and nuns, we see that they are just blood and flesh people, emotional creatures who often get ridicule for no reason. The first such encounter we have in a scene in which a priest preparing students for a school performance suddenly ends up in the sea of
tears, which comes as an absolute shock.
Director Gerwig not only gives us an explanation of these emotions, especially in the dialogue, but gradually gets a deeper insight into the state of this character. As the action with ecclesiastical characters doesn't go to the forefront, to some elements of the story you need to pay a little more attention, which in the end forms a truly valuable viewing experience.
Of course, Lady Bird is not an ideal movie. Gerwig, in her escape to objectively promote diversity and freedom, leads side-by-side narrative currents. The film raises questions of faith, sexuality, feminism, terrorism, serious medical and mental illnesses, although rarely one of these topics gets enough attention or representation. The scene in which high school students learn about abortion seems to be violently inserted because of diversity, because it doesn't bring anything in character development or in the course of the story itself.
Note: This was my translation from Croatian to English from Ziher hr article ''Realistična slika sazrevanja'' by A.Fatic