Ginger & Rosa is a very serious film about truly dark secrets, and the tenuousness of life. It tells the tale of a young girl, Ginger, played by Elle Fanning, who literally can not see a future for herself (or the rest of the world, for that matter; the film is set during the Cuban Missile Crisis) until she becomes in touch with her secret, and exposes the "villain" to her family.
It takes some prodding from Annette Bening's character, an American activist, and a sort of mother figure to the young activist-minded Ginger, and an incarceration, to finally see a future.
(And, can I just say, that Annette Bening is truly one of the best of a small handful of great actors working in the cinema today.)
The film, honestly, gets off to a rousing start, and then becomes very uneven in terms of acting and writing before becoming a steaming locomotive with power-packed gut wrenching scenes and very smart editing, eventually coming to a conclusion with two monster sequences/scenes.
This film also contains the best slap I have seen in the cinema since Mildred Pierce let Veda have it back in the Forties!
Sally Potter wrote and directed, and she is a director I have seriously not paid enough attention to. That will be corrected, and I will keep you updated.
Ginger & Rosa comes extremely highly recommended by me, but I will warn you, it is slow at times; is extremely heavy material; and not every one of the American actors exactly does a great job with their English accents. But, even the greatest of cinema experiences can be slightly flawed sometimes.
(Plus, Christina Hendricks is in it. What more do you need?)
Mwah, ...
