Growing Pains: Rites of Passage, Questions of Trust, and Bending Reality
By Michelle Miller, Chief Editor
Watch The Other Side of the Mountain, An Uncomfortable Woman, Mosquito, Peeps, Sofa So Good, The Difficult Kids and Newspaper News here.
The seven short films curated under the title “Growing Pains” encompass a broad range of female-lead films. We explore the allegorical in the beautiful French offering The Other Side of the Mountain. An Uncomfortable Woman unearths a young woman’s feelings of dread as she stumbles to recover in the wake of two massive losses. Mosquito plunges into the discomforting and wordlessly metaphorical. Peeps plucks away at teenage preening, social politics, and meanness. It lays bare the insecurities of a flock of girls and their struggles to belong and to be seen. The Difficult Kids is a satirical take on fame and the teenage cult of personality. The whimsically animated Newspaper News is pure poetry, a seedling of hopeful longing in a world of dark and foreboding headlines. We land in the comical ennui and a woman’s angst-ridden search for comfort and truth in Sofa So Good.
Each is a journey across a personal threshold to the heart of one’s individual identity and, ultimately, their defiance of cultural expectation. There are blood pacts, rituals, feats of strength and moments of quiet vulnerability. Several of the films explore the tension and competition one identifies with, the basest of group dynamics one might find in toxic female friendships.
The Other side of the Mountain begins as an eerie fairytale of young girls held in a mountain orphanage. It is beautifully illustrated and narrated. The art direction in the live-action is sparse, elegant and foreboding. There is a gothic quality that is steeped with symbolism as once the girls reach thirteen, they are spirited away by the faceless matron that minds them.
There are two factions among the orphans. One group of girls, led by the tenacious Anna, is clearly in training under her Spartan disciple. Her followers practice crawling as if under fire, throwing punches with gusto, taking aim and shooting imaginary arrows with precision. They are planning to escape.
The smallest of these girls is Jeanne, and she ends up shunned when she is unable to follow through on the blood-pact with her more robust, older peers. She is quickly taken in and asked to divulge the secrets of her former allies to the other group.
Iris leads the other group in far more gentile activities, such as braiding each other’s hair and hosting tea parties. They have accepted their fate in docile obedience. Iris coaxes Jeanne into betraying Anna, who is punished for her rebellion.
A single knell signals the entrance of the matron. Her chic, crimson silhouette looms in the doorway like a sinister Carmen San Diego and ushers the oldest girl away.
After freeing Anna, who escapes into the night, the timid Jeanne summons her courage and follows. She assembles the group to search in the perils outside their walls for one of their own.
The metaphor of crossing from girlhood into womanhood is indicated gracefully. There are also parallels to Plato’s allegory of the cave. The girls must cast off illusions and unite to tear at the seams of societal constraints and emerge from darkness into the light of what is really “real.”
The cast of young actresses, especially the spunky Sasha Stanimirovic, show maturity beyond their tender years. Nina Doré’s direction is seamless.
An Uncomfortable Woman finds Dylan, played by Robin Beltran, in a state of paranoia and upheaval. Her mother died after an illness that she kept secret from her grown daughter. Dylan’s engagement has disintegrated and she is forced to move back in with her absent father after the breakup. Dylan is in a shame cycle and feels constant existential threat as she waits for the final tragedy to round out bad things coming in threes. Consequently, she sees danger in every man she encounters: a jogger behind her on the path, a leering waiter.
The fear and dread are cut with the humor of her insatiably horny best friend, Lisa, portrayed by the hilarious, Haley Alea Erickson. Lisa is of the mind that the only way to get “over” someone is to get ”under” someone else, stat. She mobilizes her dating apps and social networks to rustle up a raging party to cheer up her friend.
There is an incredibly honest moment in which Dylan absentmindedly starts to text her deceased mother to see if she might borrow an outfit. Dylan realizes her mistake and is awash in fresh and genuine grief. After establishing her armor, Beltran lets it fall to the side, exposing real pathos and vulnerability.
At the party, Dylan reconnects with Robbie, a now successful blast from the past. After months of hyper-vigilance, she relents and lets down her guard—but will that blind-spot be her undoing?
The tagline for Mosquito is “How much pain must we endure from those we love?” The score is taught and specific to the action, as there are no words uttered in the entirety of the film. It is a film about the needs and resentments that go unexpressed in relationships, and it plays beautifully. Ava, played by Jimmy Fay, gets an angry welt, like an inflamed mosquito bite, each time her boyfriend kisses her.
Though he is seemingly attentive, he tends to her on his own terms and timeline, wounding her with his thoughtlessness. Instead of death by a thousand cuts, it is death by a thousand pecks—or mosquito bites. Like any irritation, the damage accumulates over time, as do the bottles of discarded calamine lotion. No amount of baths can soothe the sting.
She even cuts herself literally to the quick. Even though there is no discernible hangnail, she clips her manicured blue polished nails to the point of drawing blood. It is a self-inflicted declawing, the loss of her edge.
There are subtle allusions to Ava’s feelings of imprisonment, as shot through the bars of an iron railing, as well as her estrangement from her friend, as seen through a screen door.
The metaphor becomes less abstract and more surreal when Ava searches for bug repellent after a New Years Eve slight. She eventually reaches for something more lethal, and the result is startling.
Mosquito is beautifully shot, with gorgeous cinematography, courtesy of Cooper James. Alexis B. Preston directs with precision and says volumes with zero dialogue.
In Sophie Somerville’s Peeps, the birds of a feather fight together. The fraught dynamics of queen bee cruelty and wannabe capitulation were filmed “guerilla-style” against the backdrop of a busy shopping mall. There is a frenzied spontaneity that comes from the “run and gun” nature of the filming that lends itself well to the short attention span and dizzying high stakes one associates with the social hierarchy among teenage girls.
No doubt “Peeps” is a play on words regarding friendship and language. Though all of the dialogue takes place inside the mall, there is an odd melding of nature with the man-made. There are birds flitting through the food court and alighting on the marble floors. When we first see the sweet and quirky Xanthe, she is chirping along with them. There is an undercurrent of bird chirps and “peeps” throughout the film. According to the credits, the film is “narrated by a variety of different species of shopping center birds.” The bird narration is subtitled, as if the birds are observers of the girls’ vibrant inner lives, imaginings, and insecurities that they keep hidden from their cadre.
Peeps is a film in five parts, each section reflecting the psyche of the girl it portrays. The breakdown is similar to the corrosive and shallow relationships we encounter in Heathers or Mean Girls. Chelsea is the jewel atop the social pyramid. Anna is her resentful second. Felicia drowns out the din in her daydreams and worries about the bleakness of the world. Linda laments her unoriginality and feels invisible. In the end, Xanthe, who is mocked from the outset for her love of birds, throws away her need to fit in and embraces her communion with her winged friends, leaving Linda earthbound in her ordinariness.
Sound is a vital element in Peeps. Beyond the high octane gossip of the girls and the narration of the birds, the score is a thoughtful mix of melismatic baroque flutes and classical gravitas. After Chelsea exits, Anna’s claws emerge and we hear “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem, the translation of which is:
“Full of tears will be that day
When from the ashes shall arise
The guilty man to be judged;”
Cool and clever, sweet and sour, Peeps is an unconventional take on a right of passage never to be repeated.
The Difficult Kids is a satirical look at the malignant narcissism of influencer culture and viral fame. Abigail is what happens when a wounded kid isn’t raised by a loving mother but by “mom-anger,” that has her daughter’s bad behavior exploited for profit. She is the embodiment of an unfettered Freudian id without a moral conscience to mediate its appetite. What is a little psycho like this to do with herself other than manipulate her friend into starting a cult and luring her smitten classmate, Tony, to her home to offer him as a ritual sacrifice to Satan as she speaks in tongues? Pretty standard stuff.
Sophie Virio is stellar in the role of Abigail. She is shameless as she indicts “pink cardigan bitches” on a Jerry Springer redux talk show, chilling in her gleeful calculations to brutally murder and dismember the unsuspecting, Kaden Jet May, as Tony.
Director and writer, Erin Ellen McLaughlin captures the humor and horror that is Abigail and her plotting in equal measure.
A woman is so consumed by her newspaper contents that it engulfs her and she ends up set adrift in its pages. Newspaper News is gorgeously illustrated in softly blurred strokes of watercolor for reality and the sharp, chaotic lines of oil pastels to illustrate the harshness of the headline. Our heroine is drowning in oceans ravaged by waste and the impending doom of the headlines. The darkness threatens to swallow her into black nothingness, but she beats it back and carves out an island of hope in a sea of despair. She plants seedlings of hope, and up springs undulating signs of life and joyful movement. Newspaper News invites the viewer to do exactly as the woman does and oppose a sea of troubles by drawing another outcome. Sophie Laskar, the director, writer, and lead illustrator has created a visual oasis for all of us encountering dark times.
Anyone who has lived semi-broke in the chaos of New York City, loved hard, and lost a really good couch in a break up can relate to Sofa So Good. Every relationship has a contract and there are certain agreements we make that are not always met in good faith. False advertising abounds on every platform, from Craigslist to Tinder. Everyone seems to pull a bait and switch on the relentless young protagonist. Be it Abeer’s roommate who moved in under the pretense of bringing a couch, but instead argues she fulfills her roommate courtesy requirement because she has the decency to watch porn wearing headphones. Or the men she encounters on her quest to find a couch before her mother’s visit. It is about unmet expectations, deep disappointments, and finding comfort in making the best out of a free, rebounder trampoline when your ex kept the sofa you shared. Comedian, Nataly Aukar is incredulous at her circumstance but undeterred and incapable of false emotion. Hoam Abbass brings heart to the role of Abeer’s mother and is a far cry from her politely power-hungry role as Marcia on HBO’ Succession.
Watch The Other Side of the Mountain, An Uncomfortable Woman, Mosquito, Peeps, Sofa So Good, The Difficult Kids and Newspaper News here. Craving more female-directed films? We recommend watching Female Gaze Features such as 39 1/2, Between Waves, and Apocalypse A-Go-Go. These films, among many more, can also be found here.