Growth, generational differences and sexuality are some of the themes of "20th Century Woman", directed by Mike Mills (Toda Forma de Amor) and produced by A24. The film is a great quilt of memories, it has an autobiographical tone that gives the viewer a feeling of nostalgia and longing. Timeless, it tells the story of our grandmothers, mothers and women in general. In the plot, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) is a 15-year-old boy who lives in the coastal city of Santa Barbara, in the 1970s, and was raised solely by his mother Dorothea (Annette Bening) who, to support the family, rents rooms in her house. Guest house. Dorothea had her son at age 40 and, despite having raised him alone until then, she begins to feel that a generational gap is emerging between the two. The solution he finds is to ask for help from two other women: Julie (Elle Fanning), Jamie's best friend; and Abbie (Greta Gerwig), one of his guests.
Despite Jamie's apparent protagonism, the three women - Dorothea, Julie and Abbie - are the true focus of the narrative. We are introduced to their trajectories so far and we delve deeper into the dilemmas that haunt them. The boy ends up serving as a bridge that connects these characters, a common point in their diverse personalities. Dorothea represents the generation that survived wars and the Great Depression, who experienced a fragmented world full of social and political problems. The film's matriarch represents her solidity and generational strength, but also demonstrates some difficulty in opening herself up to the changes she witnesses, especially through her firstborn. We see here the representation of a postfeminists, a woman who, despite having no theoretical knowledge or activism within the feminist movement (still embryonic in her time and far from being the blind militancy of today), already practices it on a daily basis, in a unconscious, the independence desired by so many women.
Speaking of the other protagonists, we have Abbie, who is an artist and photographer, being the rebellious spirit of the time. Through her, we see the boom in punk culture, the growth of the feminist movement and the dilemmas of a young woman in her early 20s. The third figure in this "female trinity" is Julie, Jamie's best friend and youthful crush. Played perfectly by Elle Fanning (Somewhere), the teenager presents new tribulations that probably weren't part of Dorothea or Abbie's youth. Female sexuality, as well as male awakening, is explored through this character who makes us remember how adolescence is a complicated period, but essential in shaping the way we see the world and relate to people. As she is the closest character to Jamie in terms of age, the film ends up showing us two different perspectives on the same period of growth and maturation.
"20th Century Woman" has a very biographical and memorial sort of tone. Clearly the film does not cover all of its characters or historical passages, nor would it be able to do so. Her ambition is different: to casually uncover the reflections of three women born in the 1920s, 1950s and 1960s and who lived together at the end of the 70s. At all times we have the impression that someone is telling us a story, remembering their past. This is reinforced by the voice-over narration that alternates between the characters' voices; through historical archive images and also through the cinematography of Sean Porter ("Green Book"), which adopts colors and lighting that remind us, in several scenes, of daydreams, dreams and fragments of memory. Set mainly within this house, in simple conversations in the kitchen and bedrooms, the film manages to portray the long transformation in the ways of thinking of several generations in the United States. From the common daily life of these characters comes what is most beautiful and powerful in the feature film: the short and incisive dialogues. In fact, they are the driving force of the work. There is always a couple of characters talking about some cultural element that they don't understand. Simple, every day and sensitive, it is a film in tune with the feminine trajectory, a journey that is strengthened by looking at the example, in each small story. All three protagonists shine in their roles and even the male supporting actors, including young Lucas Jade Zumann (Anne with an E), get the tone of their characters right.
The script not only intelligently follows Jamie's growth - growth that we see only in ideological and cultural terms, not in age, which may seem strange at first, but it must be admitted that it was a good choice by the director -; but also of geographic space, of social changes in California and throughout the United States. Events such as Civil Rights marches (from the same vintage, see I'm Not Your Negro to expand this discussion), the sexual liberation of the 1960s, the end of the hippie movement and the true entry of the punk movement and its arrival and derivations in the USA are approached and shown in the work through photographs, which serve as historical context, relief for the script and more "modern" composition (and this is not a demerit) of the film's aesthetics.
There is a narration by Jamie and the other characters, who tell their fates, almost like a loving confession for the viewer. The way the human factor is shown in the film has its greatest strength in these voices, which never fail to show their weaknesses, their mistakes, their exaggerations and often unacknowledged regrets. Knowing what happens to them, we have the story of a life, the path taken by these women (and men!) until their death. And believe me, there won't be a viewer who is past adolescence and who doesn't feel touched or see something from their own lives represented in this film; things like a lost childhood love; like a great friendship that moves away and never comes into contact afterwards; like influences and ideas of a certain age that will later dissipate and give way to new thoughts.
The philosophical note of the script and its metaphysical appearance is not gratuitous. Nor did the strands of feminism appear at a time when they were gaining ground and being discussed. Despite being a very humorous work, and the scene at a dinner in which Abbie encourages everyone to talk about menstruation is particularly hilarious and important, it is also extremely melancholic. The soundtrack with music from the time and photography help create this environment. But melancholy is mainly in the narration, as it is as if each of the characters looked from the outside and recounted their lives in the past and future, in other words, we have the feeling that everything will pass, and as in life, everything will always pass. A beautiful scene that illustrates this is when Dorothea returns from a party, a first for her, and asked by her son what it was like, she responds: "It was like...life changing". There are also no deaths or great tragic pushes so that the ideas of entire generations are explored and well-treated through speeches, an excellent soundtrack that ranges from jazz to punk and that ends in relationships with "Stage Door (1937)" , "Casablanca (1942)", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)" and even a perfectly well inserted excerpt from "Koyaanisqatsi (1982)", to mark, in the film, an era of structural changes in the country that words alone couldn't cover. Combined with an excerpt from President Jimmy Carter's speech, we have in a beautifully composed and carefully photographed shot, men and women, of different ages, ethnicities and social conditions, sharing a space and having different ideas and experiences about what they saw, heard and experienced at that time.
Headed by the exceptional performance of Annette Bening, the cast is one of the main responsible for the excellence of "20th Century Woman", a film that does not shy away from complexities nor does it shy away from touching on thorny themes. The changing role of women in society intersects the narrative, strengthening the record of the time and significantly inserting itself as a decisive component. An example of this is the scene in which Abbie vehemently problematizes other people's embarrassment at the mention of menstruation. Some resources, such as the voice-over narration that, even before the end, explains what happened to certain characters, has questionable impacts, especially on our already guaranteed emotional support, thus sounding slightly unnecessary. Nothing, however, that softens or tarnishes the beauty arising from the simple look that Mike Mills takes on these people of flesh and blood, who try to overcome the adversities arising from the passing of time and life.
Throughout the film, whose script was nominated for an Oscar, Mike Mills returns to this issue, the understanding that a human being has of himself and others. Above, we talked about how neither Annette Bening nor the director dare to try to resolve the contradictions of her character, but it remains to be emphasized that in this reticence, more than intellectual virtuosity, a humanist celebration is implicit. There is something wonderfully unpredictable about human life, in its complicated journeys through history, time, in its creation of strange and multifaceted personalities, but it is precisely in this impossible-to-assimilate grandeur that its glory lies. According to Mills and his film, like Jamie and Dorothea, we will never be able to completely understand another person, perhaps we won't even understand ourselves. In its conclusion, "20th Century Woman" reminds us of an intrinsically human and humanistic truth: not being able to know the other completely does not imply unhappiness or loneliness as this is just a reflection of the cosmic, almost magical complexity that is being- if human.
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