It’s a bitter movie. It’s not bad but I don’t like the ending because it’s not a clear one, at least not to me. What happened to all the girls that escaped from the police? What happened to the man who was shot? Was he saved or did he die? I understand that before this movie there was a book and a previous film as well, but I know nothing of either of them.
The movie is a bitter one because it’s placed in a world very difficult for girls. We see that one gets raped by a guy while outside his friends laugh and go on with their business. A teacher humiliating a girl in class. Generally men and adults doing what they want and nobody caring for this girls poor and powerless. A group of them gets together to form a gang called Foxfire to rebel against this society and defend one another. It starts slow, with writings and drawings, then it escalates. They beat the uncle of one of them who wanted to abuse her (how many of this shit are really in this world?) and one day Legs (Raven Adamson) stops a boy harassing one of them by pointing a knife at his throat. Only the girls, all the them, are expelled from school. They go away like inebriated and on the heat of the moment they steal the car of a rich man. The police follow them; they have an accident and are caught. They are all convicted but only Legs is sent to prison. In there the worst of all was a nasty woman who put thumbs in her eyes, and Legs wonders why a woman would do that, men are the enemy but women are not all of them allies, she learns.
Finally out she reunites with her friends. She has a dream and rents a house where all girls could live together. She pays for the house and the car, happy of the sisterhood she created.
Only Maddy is concerned about trivial things like the money to buy food for everybody. Their number is growing and everybody gives what they can, but only a few of them work so it's not enough. Another thing that upsets Legs is the other girls' attitude towards her prison friend. They don't want her because she's black, thus showing how little they believe in this sisters-thing. Only three of them accepted her, eight of them said no. By now Legs decides they need money and they'll take it from men, by having them come to an empty place where they think they'll get sex while instead they'll get robbed. I didn't like how this choice was portrayed. I don't know how it was in the book, I must look for it because the story is intriguing, but in the movie it was just like "i'm tired of Maddy nagging about money problems, let's go and steal some".
Legs made another friend in prison, a rich girl come to visit as a form of charity, I suppose, but that is indeed a nice girl with a nice family that opens their house to her. Legs wants to abduct the father and ask a big ransom, so to not having to worry about money ever again. He was offering her and Violet a good job, but it wasn't enough for her. Maddy leaves the group, it's too changed for her, and Rita (I think) gets expelled because she liked a guy. The girls go on with the plan, but it's not as easy as they thought; they hide him in the house, but he won't collaborate. One girl accidentally shoots him and it all goes bad. Legs sends all the girls away to protect them, and only three or four of them stay with her. She calls for an ambulance for him and they run away, Legs driving. This time they're not caught, but we don't know what happens to them. We then see that Maddy has a job she likes and Rita has a beautiful baby. They meet and they talk remembering the times of the Foxfires. Good for them that they got out, still they don't know what happened to the others so we don't either. Rita thinks she recognized Legs in a newspaper picture among some revolutionaries somewhere, but they can't be sure.
My problem with this film is the unsatisfying ending and the bitterness of the girls against other girls (although that is so true in real life, which is even more bitter), and the reason for it all. Maddy and Rita talk about Legs as if they miss her, as if she was the reason for doing it all, but when you watch the movie she's like a normal girl with a dream of sisterhood, but it almost seems like the other girls followed her because it was fun to be all together without parents and because it was more fun to steal the money from shit men than to actually work, and because they were like inebriated by this we-can-do-everything-we-want policy. They didn't seem to really care about what happened to other girls, they didn't seem to really, really care about each other either. Why did all this happen? They didn't like the idea of working like regular people? I didn't understand why Legs made such choices. Why did she hate men so much? Why didn't she trust anybody at all aside from the girls she wanted to protect? Also she put all her ideas on their mind, everything they do was their choice, and yet she accepted without a second word when they didn't accept her friend.
I don't know. The film was good, the actors were good, specially the one playing Maddy, but all in all it was not 100% convincing.
In Italy: Foxfire-ragazze cattive
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento