Somehow, Sally Potter’s new film Ginger & Rosa is both timely and anachronistic. To begin with the latter, the movie begins in 1945, with the births of Ginger and Rosa, who are destined to be friends from the entry into this world, and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima. This juxtaposition comes with melodramatic creative license – the mothers lay on stretchers in a London hospital, holding hands, sweating and crying in synchrony – but certainly illustrates a world filled with total annihilation as well as perpetual life.
The years flit by in a flash, and we are reunited with the teenage Ginger (Elle Fanning) and Rosa (Alice Englert) in 1972. Ginger is initially shy. Rosa is the rebellious one, teaching her to smoke, how to kiss boys, and how to hitchhike. The complement each other, as do their families. Despite the presumed mothers’ friendship from the opening scene, it appears that tensions have built in the last seventeen years and they have drifted apart, an ominous foreshadowing of things to come. While Rosa’s mother is mostly absent from the film – save a brief appearance or two and the penultimate scene – Ginger’s mother, Natalie (Christina Hendricks), is – in her daughter’s estimation – overbearing. Natalie is the culturally constructed homemaker, trying to raise her daughter, keep her out of trouble, and cook for her husband Roland (Alessandro Nivola), a man who justifies each of his numerous transgressions by stating his intent to defy mindless obedience, narcissistic rhetoric that permits him to cheat on his wife, be a dirty old man, and an all-around ass.
But it seems to be this forced coupling of Natalie and Roland that defines the theme of the movie: the status quo is an illusion. It exists because we insist on persisting the ruse, despite its – and our own – failings. A subtext here is most highlighted in the bookends of 1945 and 1971, the bombing of Hiroshima and the Cuban Missile Crisis. These two events frame the lives of the Ginger and Rosa that we know, teaching them that rebellion begets destruction, and destruction is mutually assured. In other words, the bomb controls behavior through fear. In theory, this fear maintains the norm.
However, the norm is in constant conflict with human nature. Natalie doesn’t want to be an abject domestic, but she is. We don’t see her longing for an exciting life, but we know that she sees her actions as futile. Roland sees her actions as a means for survival in that, well, she feeds him, but he sees little additional value and refuses to acknowledge her actions. Caught in the middle of an iconoclast and a traditionalist, Ginger must choose one path or the other – these lines too are rather clearly drawn – but both come with destruction: the former destroys her identity, the latter destroys her family.
Roland’s character is doubly fascinating in that he best resembles – and ironically so – the survival ethos, one that was also exhibited in the dropping of two atomic bombs. While Roland protests the government’s actions, he brazenly fractures his marriage and escalates his infatuation with Rosa into a full-on affair. Falling out of time with his own generation, he seeks a younger shill to replace Natalie. She’s more easily groomed and malleable. Unlike Ginger, who’s seeking independence, Rosa is seeking a parental figure, even if it’s in a Freudian sense. Like Ginger, either choice Rosa makes will destroy something.
As for the timeliness of Ginger & Rosa, there’s something fascinating about our missing fear of destruction. Here in North America and most of Europe, each day is not filled with the feeling of imminent destruction. Perhaps it should be, given that many more countries have access to weapons of mass destruction than they did in 1972. Or perhaps we’ve lost sight of these possibilities because they’ve been given nefarious, yet academic sounding euphemisms and abbreviations like WMDs.
Ginger & Rosa is flawed and held afloat by Elle Fanning’s stunning performance. Like she did in Super 8, Fanning carries this movie and tempts us to follow each of her subsequent roles. However, the story is less fluffy and generic than other critics would have you believe. If nothing else, Ginger & Rosa is a testament to how we’ve lost sight of our own precariousness.
