SPOILERS BELOW
A smart, touching lament against the societal pressures that young girls face as they approach womanhood.
The film smartly subverts the male gaze, transferring the camera moves and choreography of the typical lascivious music video to a realist setting, to reveal its tawdriness. While the young female characters work hard to sexualise themselves, the film works just as hard to achieve the opposite, using natural lighting, pointing unflattering HD at the girls' faces sans make-up, surrounding them with similarly aged siblings and classmates, revealing their much-touted glitzy talent contest to be a small, sad affair, and constantly portraying them as naive, giggling, gross little kids. The film only (with one happy exception) strays from this realist treatment to treat the actual reality of puberty as a horror movie monster. "You're a woman now," Amy's mother tells her, with a delivery that sounds more like a portent of doom than happy maternal bonding.
It's not just hyper-sexualisation that is under fire here; the presumed destiny of housewife is another face of the patriarchy on show. Amy's great-aunt tells her "I'll show you what a woman is" and promptly shoves in a kitchen to peel vegetables all day. Meanwhile Amy's mother cries through phone calls feigning happiness that her ever-absent husband has decided to take a second wife.
It also features as impressively large and accomplished a child ensemble as School Of Rock, supported with strong adult performances.
The film has seen a fair amount of controversy, thanks at least in part to Netflix's typically thoughtless, misrepresentative marketing imagery, which indulged in all the queasy sexualisation that the film itself so nimbly avoids.
Rating: Great.
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