In “Ginger & Rosa,” the newest film by Sally Potter, two teenage girls lean on each other to bear the heavy weight of adolescence while growing up in 1962 London.
Potter unmasks the beating heart of London’s youth with a balanced display of iconic 1960s fads to show the fervor of society. Her characters bond over ironing hair and shrinking jeans in the bathtub with as much glee as today’s teeny-boppers scoring tickets to Justin Bieber.
Elle Fanning plays the heartbreakingly sincere Ginger, a self-proclaimed poet and pacifist searching for answers during the anxiety-ridden Cuban Missile Crisis. The far-off danger threatens to upend Ginger’s way of life, and its toxic feelers creep all the way into the relationship between her free-thinking (but flighty) father, played by Alessandro Nivola, and her onetime-painter-now-housewife mother, played by Christina Hendricks.
Both Ginger and Rosa aim never to be domestic housewives like their mothers, and they eagerly explore a world of coming-to-age adventure filled with skipping school, boys, late-night partying and protesting the nuclear war.
Rosa, played by Alice Englert, fearlessly leads the duo. She patiently teaches Ginger how to kiss and smoke a cigarette, and curiously enough, even takes Ginger to church to learn how to pray. Ginger seeks her friend’s sisterly guidance with dewy-eyed awe, and for a time, she revels in Rosa’s shadow.
But Rosa’s idle flirtation with boys soon turns to men, and to Ginger’s horror, she finds her father to be the next all-too-willing object of Rosa’s affections.
Ginger fights with conviction to save her world from possible nuclear extinction, passionately throwing herself behind the Ban the Bomb cause. But she is helpless when it comes to holding the strings of her family together.
The threat of nuclear war eventually manifests itself in a loss of innocence for the fiery redhead, who loses herself while chasing after the heels of her rule-breaking best friend.
The film will be showing at the Hippodrome starting Friday. For ticket information visit www.thehipp.org.
