The revelation in Sally Potter’s coming of age melodrama Ginger and Rosa is Elle Fanning, the film’s 15-year-old lead actress who manages to take a weepy teenage character and turn her into a knot of pathos. We’ve seen young Fanning in more mainstream films like Super 8 and We Bought a Zoo, but Ginger offers Fanning the opportunity to explore great nuance and bear the hefty burden of carrying an entire film with her performance.
Ginger’s mother gave birth to her alongside the bed of Rosa’s mother. The two girls grew up together, became best friends, but now as they move through adolescence, exterior forces exert strain on the relationship. Rosa (Alice Englert) is bolder, more sexually aware, and riskier than Fanning’s Ginger. The real tension mounts when the budding young girl catches the eye of Ginger’s father, Roland (Alessandro Nivola), a playboy professor who is estranged from Ginger’s mother.
Set in the early 1960s, the backdrop of Potter’s Douglas Sirk-styled film is a British society straining at the seams. From the first scene we know that Ginger is troubled by news reports of the escalating Cuban missile crises, and her concern and paranoia drives her to becoming an anti-nuclear weapons activist. The metaphor is set in play: the bomb takes the place of the imposing sense of doom that the changes of adolescence can provoke. But the real societal changes already seem afoot. The protest marches Ginger attends read like proto-hippie rallies, and the tension between Ginger’s mother and Roland bring to surface frustrations of women’s role in society, suggesting the seeds of a sprouting feminism will ripen just as Ginger hits her more mature years.
It’s a lot to squeeze into a backdrop, and sometimes Ginger and Rosa can feel forced or hokey, pedagogical or didactic. Ultimately, though, it is a more personal and intimate tragedy that provides the spark that explodes Ginger’s world, the realization that her bolder friend is on a different life trajectory, making the precise mistakes they swore they would never commit. These are earnest, heartfelt themes, and thanks to Fanning, and a capable ensemble, they resonate, even as the film’s third act sputters and starts.
