Ginger & Rosa.

Sally Potters latest cinematic offering is the story of maudlin 60’s middle class politically motivated academics who appear to live in abject poverty.  Seen through the eyes of two 17-year-old best friends, Ginger & Rosa (2012) are born to mothers in adjoining hospital beds on the same day in 1945 that the USA bombed Hiroshima. Rosa’s father left when she was quite small and her mother has had problems controlling her daughter ever since. Gingers father Roland (Alessandro Nivola) is a left-leaning academic, a conscientious objector in World War 2, a philander who has very little idea how to keep a relationship going with his domesticated wife (Christina Hendricks) and hold his family together.

The best friends fall out over Rosa's sex life.

On hearing about the threat of the Cuban Missile Crises, Ginger obsesses about the prospect of a nuclear holocaust, joining CND and taking part in Aldermaston Marches. Meanwhile Rosa is more interested in the sexual revolution and begins having sex with Gingers irresponsible father. This affair begins to drives a wedge between the two girls.

Rosa is portrayed by new comer and daughter of Jane Campion, Alice Englert and Ginger by Elle Fanning who was 13 year’s old when this film was made, both girls deserve a special mention even if Fanning’s American accent came through at times. Potter, whose best known film is Orlando (1992) which starred Tilda Swinton and was based on a novel by Virginia Woolf, must have had her reasons for casting her main leads in this coming of age drama from the other side of the Atlantic?

Gingers political conscience.

It may look like the 1960’s, credit to Andrea Arnolds DOP Robbie Ryan, but doesn’t feel like the 1960’s even with its unobtrusive jazz soundtrack. A lightweight, autobiographical film written by the director about a heavyweight subject but I can’t help but feel that Potter has missed an opportunity to delve into the psyche of the late 1950’s and the early 60’s and produce something a lot more enthralling. 

Orlando

Orlando falls for the  Princess.

Orlando (1992) stars the perfectly cast Tilda Swinton and is the story of a journey through time, of someone who lives for four hundred years, first as a man, then as a woman. As a young nobleman, Orlando is given land, property and money by Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp) if he agrees to the Queens command “ Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old”. After the monarch death, he falls passionately in love with the visiting Russian Princess Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey) on the glittering ice of the frozen river Thames. The princess leaves Orlando, however, and, after a disastrous brush with poetry, he takes up his "manly" destiny as an Ambassador in the deserts of central Asia. There, in the midst of war, unwilling to kill or be killed, he changes sex. As a woman, Orlando returns to the formal salons of 18th century London, where she faces a choice: marry and have heirs or lose everything as she faces several impending lawsuits arguing that Orlando was a woman to begin with and therefore has no right to the land or any of her/his royal inheritance Finally, this androgynous being having lived a most bizarre existence emerges into a twentieth century as an ordinary individual with a child and having written a book now finds some tranquility.

Directed and adapted by Sally Potter from Virginia Woolf’s 1928 semi biographical novel Orlando: A Biography, based in part on the life of Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West the English author and poet.

An unqualified delight, a movie not to be missed, believe me this rather unique fantasy is not your standard costume drama and has been described as a “gender-bending epic”! It had the distinction of introducing both Tilda Swinton and Sally Potter to a wider cinema audience.