Born on the same day as the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Rosa and Ginger grow together into adolescence. Now aged sixteen, their pasts already heavy on their shoulders, the girls find themselves in a world on the cusp of a possible nuclear war. Ginger's reaction is one of deep worry and an amorphous desire to do something about it, whereas Rosa embarks on a quest to find the love she feels she is missing. As the two girls lives diverge they head towards their own cataclysmic conclusion.

Ginger and Rosa (2012 - 1 hr, 26 min, 10 sec) is a coming of age character study written and directed by Sally Potter. The film won three awards and was nominated for a further five.

The film charts a small, but important period in the girls lives in 1962, when they were both sixteen. Rosa has grown up feeling unloved, her father having left when she was young. As she crests the wave of womanhood she makes the usual mistake of confusing love with sex, and ends up looking for love in all the wrong places.

Ginger's own family is dysfunctional. Her mother, Natalie (Christina Hendricks) is a frustrated painter, having subsumed her ambition to become a housewife to Ginger's father, Roland (Alessandro Nivola). Roland, for all his intellectualism, is a moral coward - unable, even when Ginger needs him the most, to stand up for the truth.

His philosophical stance regarding personal freedom without responsibility has consequences and although Roland’s stance on the war is laudable, he went to jail for refusing to participate in the Second World War, taken to extreme his philosophy can do little but destroy lives.

The story of the girls relationship and the gulf which grows between them is played against the background of the Cuban missile crisis. The crisis is analogous with events in Ginger’s own life with her parents disintegrating relationship and Roland’s relationship with Rosa, Ginger's life spirals to a climactic crisis which will forever change her world.

There are no real villains in the film. Rosa seeks the love, trying to make up in sexual relationships the ghost of her missing father; her mother's need to work has also left a void in Rosa’s life. Ginger, for her part, finds it difficult to be both witness and unwilling participant in her parents’ disintegrating marriage, finding herself, initially as a sympathiser to her father’s idea of personal responsibility, until his amoral actions start to tear her world apart.

There is little not to like about this film. Elle Fanning (Ginger) is the central character and has to carry much of the film, a task which she does effortlessly. Fanning is concurrently enchanting and vulnerable, making for wonderful performance. Rosa (Alice Englert) is potentially less sympathetic character, but Englert wears Rosa’s pain well, without getting self-pitying, Rosa is more misguided than malicious.

The rest of the cast just add the extra cream to what is an already perfectly formed cake. Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt play a gay couple and uncles to Ginger - the only emotionally stable rock in Ginger's otherwise tumultuous life and the only successfully married couple. Their friend, May Bella (Annette Bening) fans the fire of Ginger's social consciousness and radicalism.

The cinematography is wonderful, with use of light and shadow to enhance the emotional centre of the scenes. The film's red/brown palette denotes the lingering urban decay which still existed from the previous war.

The film comes with a full length commentary from Sally Potter; there are a lot of insights into the characters rather than the film processes. There are cast interviews (36 min, 04 sec) with all of the main characters, it’s well worth a look, not only for insights into the film, but also because much of the cast lived through this period. I personally remember being a child, supremely terrified that I would never get a chance to grow up.

You get the original theatrical trailer (1 min, 46 sec) as well as an interview with Sally Potter (33 min, 53 sec) which deals more with the making of the film, than the commentary did.

It is certainly a film worth seeking out, a troubled, but beautiful, story of pain and redemption.

8

Charles Packer