Greta Gerwig
Lady Bird (2017)
A middle-class mother is driving her daughter to school. The
girl wants to be called Lady Bird. She
hates California and dreams of attending a college on the other coast of
the USA. Her mother tells her that the family cannot afford it.
Annoyed by her mother's litany, Lady Bird jumps off the car.
She is enrolled in a Catholic school run by nuns.
The head nun advises her to sign up for a musical.
She and her friend Julie do so, and at the
audition they meet a handsome boy, Danny.
Her mom keeps reminding her that they are not rich.
In fact, her father loses his job and falls into a well-disguised depression,
but hides it to Lady Bird.
Lady Bird and Danny fall in love. She attends a
holiday dinner at his granma's big mansion, quite a contrast with her
own parents' humble house. He is also rich. But then one day
Julie and Lady Bird catch Danny kissing another boy: he is gay.
Her father promises to help her financially even if he is broke.
Lady Bird gets a job and one day flirts with a customer, the member of a rock
band, Kyle. She also starts hanging out with Jenna,
a popular rebellious and pretentious girl who boasts about sex.
One night Jenna drives Lady Bird to a parking lot where kids meet, and Lady Bird
meets Kyle again. She starts going out with him. Meanwhile,
Danny begs Lady Bird not to tell anytbody that he is gay.
He cries on her shoulder because he's scared.
At home she has arguments with her mother, who thinks she is insensitive
to their financial situation.
She has sex with Kyle, who tells her that he is a virgin too like her.
Her mom tells her that her dad is jobless and suffering from depression.
Lady Bird, increasingly attracted to Jenna's and Kyle's more mature crowd,
has forgotten about Julie, who resents it.
Lady Bird is becoming a rebel too: she talks back to
a bigot tutor and gets suspended.
Lady Bird lies about her house to Jenna, pretending that she lives in the mansion that belongs to Danny's granma. Jenna goes to visit her there and finds out
the lie. Lady Bird loses credibility with Jenna.
Lady Bird applies to college on the East Coast thereby angering her mother
who keeps reminding her that the family cannot afford to pay for it.
Her mother wants her to enroll in a nearby college.
Lady Bird has sex again with Kyle, but this time Kyle tells her that he was
not a virgin and claims he never said it. She is disappointed.
Television keeps broadcasting news of the USA bombing Afghanistan after
the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Lady Bird is excited when she receives a reply from a university that she is
waitlisted, which is better than being rejected.
Her father is rejected at a job interview, and on the way out meets his son
who is going to the same interview (and will get the job).
Lady Bird is becoming disillusioned with Jenna's and Kyle's crowd.
Kyle offers to pick her to go to the prom dance but then Kyle and Jenna
decide to go to a party instead. Lady Bird asks to be dropped off at
Julie's home, where the girls become friends again and decide to attend
the prom together, without boys.
School's over, and the family celebrates her graduation at a restaurant.
Alas, her mother learns by accident that she has applied to colleges on
the East Coast and resents Lady Bird's selfishness so much that she stops
talking to her. She refuses to talk to her daughter even if her daughter
begs her. Lady Bird turns 18 and celebrates with her father, who sneaks
into her room, but not with her mother. Lady Bird
passes the driver-license test, buys cigarettes and a porn magazine,
all the things that she couldn't do before turning 18.
A letter arrives that she has been accepted by her favorite college in New York.
Her father keeps his promise and borrows money to pay for her studies.
Her parents drive her to the airport, but her mother still refuses to speak
to her and doesn't even see her off to the airplane. Her father does. Her
mother drives away but then starts crying and drives back. She arrives too
late to bid goodbye to her daughter.
Her father has slipped handwritten pages in Lady Bird's suitcase that she finds in New York: they are letters written by her mother that her mother never sent,
but they show all her love.
One night she gets drunk at a party and ends up in a hospital.
When she is released, she goes into a church, then calls home calling herself
Christine, not Lady Bird, and telling her mom how much she loves her.
Little Women (2019) is yet another film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's 1868 novel, possibly the seventh overall.
(Copyright © 2017 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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