20th Century Women (2016)
Directed by Mike Mills
In 1979 Santa Barbara, California, Dorothea Fields is a determined single mother in her mid-50s who is raising her adolescent son, Jamie, at a moment brimming with cultural change and rebellion. Dorothea enlists the help of two younger women – Abbie, a free-spirited punk artist living as a boarder in the Fields' home and Julie, a savvy and provocative teenage neighbour – to help with Jamie's upbringing.
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Stylistically, the film occasionally nods to Godfrey Reggio’s famed time-lapse documentary Koyaanisqatsi, which the film also name-checks, sometimes speeding up or slowing down the frame, suggesting the mutability of time.
He even imposes an occasional switch into Koyaanisqatsi mode to give the illusion of smeary LSD trails.
Lo and behold, then, that a closed-off home located in a very particular place at a very specific cultural moment — which Mills, time and again, will make the point of emphasizing through his Beginners-esque montages, too-on-the-nose Koyaanisqatsi clip and all — fosters particular ways of thinking and being.
Since Godfrey Reggio's time-lapse-intensive Koyaanisqatsi is another cultural artifact sampled by Mills, the post-production effect also manages to suggest punk as a logical extension of late postwar capitalism.
Writer/director Mike Mills—whose previous family drama Beginners (2010) was a lovable portrait of the relationship between a son and his elderly, newly declared gay dad—makes unusual use of fast-motion photography in many sequences, a choice perhaps inspired by the frenzied time-lapse of the 1982 modernist documentary Koyaanisqatsi (a movie explicitly referenced at one moment).
Bening and Gerwig are dynamite, their co-stars exceptional, and a late-game visual quote of Godfrey Reggio’s incredible 1982 documentary “ Koyaanisqatsi ” proves serendipitous in its synchronicity.
The inauspicious anonymity of that first feature gave way to something much more distinctive, and affecting, with his second one, 2010’s autobiographical Beginners , in which Mills reinvented his style into a kind of diaristic collage—a mess of memories surrounding a particularly significant chapter of his life.
There’s a talking dog in Beginners, the 2010 movie that won Christopher Plummer a supporting-actor Oscar.
It was the same with his last film, the Oscar-winning “Beginners,” which was a heartfelt tribute to his late father, who came out of the closet in his 70s.
Women doesn’t chart the major coming of age moments, but this film is certainly the next step in Mike Mills’ (Beginners) coming of age as a filmmaker.
You might remember 2011's Beginners, in which Mills told the story of his dad, a husband and father who didn’t come out of the closet until age 75.
Mills reportedly based the script on his teenage years, but without the emotionally absent father depicted in his last film, Beginners.
Sometimes it feels like a sentimental journey, à la American Graffiti, but Mills periodically uses distancing devices to make us question our own nostalgia.
And being that Abbie has been infatuated with “The Man Who Fell to Earth” since her teens, there’s also a welcome spot of David Bowie.
Abbie dyes her hair red after seeing Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which Bowie plays an alien facing an existential crisis after crash-landing on our planet.
The two other women in Jamie’s life are the lodger Abbie (Greta Gerwig), an artist and punk enthusiast who bases her appearance on that of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and Julie (Elle Fanning), the sylph-like but subversive teenager on whom he has a mad crush.
Así, mediante una estética polaroid y una distorsión psicodélica y selectiva de la imagen, nos introducimos en un viaje iconoclasta a través de la irrupción demoledora del punk en la cultura norteamericana, donde los acordes de Blondie o The Ramones propiciaban un incontrolable miedo en las viejas generaciones, al tiempo que el androgismo del glam rock y la hiperbólica teatralidad y dramatismo de Bowie o Alice Cooper hechizaban a las nuevas y las contagiaban de su histeria paranoide, como a la propia Abbie quien, influida por la fuerte impresión que le causó Thomas Jerome Newton, el personaje interpretado por David Bowie en El hombre que cayó a la tierra (The Man Who Fell To Earth, 1976), se tiño el pelo de rojo.
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Mills, who used to direct music videos and design album covers, broke into filmmaking with Thumbsucker , a terminally twee indie comedy, based on a novel but reminiscent of every suburban coming-of-age story ever to limp its way out of Sundance.
That's what stands for plot in the script that director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) has generously carved from his own life.
“20th Century Women,” like writer-director Mike Mills’ earlier features “Beginners” and “Thumbsucker,” is an indie film quirkapalooza with more great character work and worthwhile insight than such things usually boast.
A fiercely inquisitive performance from Annette Bening buoys this otherwise pedestrian indie drama by writer-director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker, Beginners), who based Bening's character on his own mother.
He’s made great strides; his feature debut, 2005’s “Thumbsucker,” was a suffocating quirk-a-thon, with a high schooler who symbolically still nursed his fattest digit, to say nothing of a score drenched in The Polyphonic Spree.”
Mike Mills' third and best film (after Beginners and Thumbsucker) is also the closest to his models in the French New Wave.
It stands bravely alongside Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy as one of the few American films that dares to ask what it is that drives society in the direction of self-medication rather than simply pointing out the collective monkey on our back.
La falta de protección en una de esas relaciones aleatorias lleva al espectador a acordarse de la película Kids (1995), pero entonces recordamos que el presente fílmico nos sitúa en 1979, todavía dentro de la zona de seguridad sexual que comenzaría a estrecharse a partir de 1981 con la devastadora era del sida.
As a general rule I am not opposed to talking-canine scenarios; for instance, the title pet of the cult picture A Boy and His Dog makes a strong argument for the idea.
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Echoing Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Julie says she isn’t here to be anyone’s concept.
Some of them reach the heights of The 400 Blows, Boyhood, Ordinary People and American Beauty while others reach the lows of painfully schmaltzy films like The Family Stone.