Ginger & Rosa
First screened in August 2013 / Reviewed in August 2024
Director: Sally Potter. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Elle Fanning, Alice Englert, Christina Hendricks, Alessandro Nivola, Jodhi May, Timothy Spall, Oliver Platt, Annette Bening, Andrew Hawley. Screenplay: Sally Potter (with "story consultant" Walter Donohue).
I responded to this more tonight than I did a decade ago. I can see where the gut symmetries on which the script is based might have felt even richer in concept: Ginger & Rosa explores the specifically early-60s relations between terror of nuclear war and terror of entering adulthood, as experienced by an impassioned and principled teenage girl, who tries to grasp the implosion of her best friendship, the (re)implosion of her family, and the (re)implosion of the world all at the same wild time. I'd also bet anything that the 90-minute film we got was a compromise from a more expansive vision that couldn't raise its necessary budget. I assume we might have gotten more of Englert, more of May, maybe more Nivola, and a stronger sense of the secondary characters who are intellectuals and radicals, played by Spall, Platt, and Bening. This feels like a movie of which Sally Potter would feel very proud while also lamenting its contraction from the more rigorous meditation and the more epic scope that seem to have been intended.
But that all bothered me less on second viewing. The breathless quality of the movie, hurtling forward while stopping for anxious pauses or for longer, more confused intervals of silence, works well to convey the mix of ideas and hormones that overtake both title characters. The more wide-eyed Ginger (Fanning) and the broodier Rosa (Englert) are trying to figure out, together and then separately, what sort of women they're going to be, and how they'll each measure the distance between what they're feeling and what they're doing about it. The film's blend of tempests and interludes, even when implying missing scenes or limited monies, do a good job of evoking that haphazard energy—of life feeling both too slow and too fast, in times of political crisis and in the red-hot current of adolescence.
Similarly, I don't get the sense there were many resources for the design departments. But whether or not it was a choice, Ginger & Rosa visually transpires in a restless border zone between historical specificity and compartmentalized abstraction, and that blend suits the movie's themes, too. Robbie Ryan furnishes his typically handsome and stylish photography while also devising with director-writer Sally Potter some crafty setups that connote a larger world than we're actually able to see. Look, for example, how they conjure a nighttime anti-nukes rally that feels credible and dangerous enough for story purposes but with almost no sets.
Acting is pretty strong throughout, with Fanning especially coming through. A penultimate scene of harrowing family disclosures really pushes this young actress to the max, and she delivers powerfully without ever seeming to overplay. Englert makes less of a confident, nuanced impression, but her air of sober, watchful disenchantment is a good, potent baseline for Rosa and gives the movie enough of what it needs from her.
Anyway: a strange film that has the courage of its subject matter, which I'm sure got written off as niche in the offices of many potential funders—and then again by audiences, who balked almost completely. But I like that strangeness, and I admire Ginger & Rosa as a story about young people (or anybody, really) who are earnest about their activism while also appropriating that activism as a conduit for possibly processing, but just as likely disguising or deferring or displacing other, less explicitly political emotions, which can only be held back so long. Grade:B–
