Thursday, August 8, 2013
Foxfire - Confessions of a Girl Gang, review
Dir Laurent Cantet; starring Raven Adamson, Katie Coseni, Madeleine Bisson
With The Class (2008) and his earlier films Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001), Laurent Cantet established himself as the most sociologically attuned French director of his generation. Foxfire, his new film, is his first in English, and you wonder if this was his key mistake. It's cast almost entirely with newcomers, playing a gang of rebel teens in Fifties working-class America, who take on chauvinists and would-be rapists alike. (You could see them as righteous prototypes for this year's voguish Bling Ring and Spring Breakers sprees of distaff lawlessness.)
Cantet has faithfully – some might say doggedly – adapted the 1993 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which was previously filmed in 1996 with Angelina Jolie. There's a certain ragged sincerity to the enterprise, but as a feminist tract it relies too much on repetitive blunt force, and as a piece of film-making it's often wearyingly drab.
When Cantet cast and shot The Class, the personalities of its young players fizzed about in that school – their non-professionalism was a virtue. Here, the entire cast are very visibly trying to act, and despite some honourable exceptions (Katie Coseni is natural and touching as the insecure narrator), they turn most scenes into a rehearsal space where a movie should be.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/2fb997db/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Cfilm0Cfilmreviews0C10A2320A310CFoxfire0EConfessions0Eof0Ea0EGirl0EGang0Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
