2018-08-10
N/A
94 min
Madeline has become an integral part of a prestigious physical theater troupe. When the workshop's ambitious director pushes the teenager to weave her rich interior world and troubled history with her mother into their collective art, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. The resulting battle between imagination and appropriation rips out of the rehearsal space and through all three women's lives.
I think part of my problem with this was that however experimental the whole concept, or concept within that concept, was meant to be - I just didn't care one way or the other about the eponymous lass (Helena Howard). It didn't start so well with "you are not a cat, you are inside a cat" - not an image I wished to conjure up on any level! Anyway, she is a wanna-be actress who is quite prepared to put in the graft to succeed, and that's no easy task when surrounded by a combination of attitudes and ambitions that are as likely hostile to her success as not. To be fair to Howard, there is something very natural about her performance - it's just a girl trying to make it whilst juggling the balls of her personal life and the camerawork is sympathetically disjointed to give the whole thing a sense of lively improvisation as her story (sort of) unfolds. It's not that is lacks a traditional structure, it's just that by determining at all costs not to conform it completely failed to offer us any positives as to what it did want to be - and quite who it was for. It's random, bizarre and sometimes quite characterful but ultimately forgets to give us any hooks onto which we could invest. I didn't care nor, I wondered, should I. It's worth a watch; it's quirky and off the wall - but I think maybe just a little too self indulgent.
