Sally Potter (2012)
By coincidence, I saw Ginger & Rosa on the forty-sixth anniversary of Aberfan, the event which, like no other, sparked fear of death in me as a child. It wasn’t the first time I’d been horrified by the thought of death; it was the first time that the panic came from an event which killed others – many others, most of them children of my own age or younger. I’d been aware for two or three years what a large-scale disaster was likely to mean. I can remember thinking there would be a war, and that my family and I would all die in the war. I don’t remember thinking of this explicitly as a nuclear war but I knew that the end would come suddenly and irresistibly. It was the realisation that this might not be the way that death intervened – that the people closest to me might not die (and go to heaven) in the very same moment that I did – that had started nagging at me in the late summer and early autumn of 1966. Aberfan crystallised these fears. Sally Potter’s new film is about the intersection of a teenage girl’s growing awareness of her own mortality and the prospect of a nuclear holocaust. It also dramatises the protagonist Ginger’s apprehension of ends of the world both global and personal: with the Cuban missiles crisis at its height, the father whom Ginger idolises is shown in his true colours. The movie opens with footage of Hiroshima from which Potter cuts to what’s happening on the other side of the world on 6 August 1945: in a London maternity ward Ginger and Rosa are born. The mushroom cloud casts a long shadow. Seventeen years later Ginger is prey to persistent fears of apocalypse.
Ginger & Rosa was released in this country on 19 October 2012, presumably to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the thirteen-day Cuban missiles crisis. The crisis began on 15 October 1962; three days before that, Sylvia Plath completed ‘Daddy’ and, in an introduction written for a BBC radio broadcast, explained that ‘The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex’. Ginger also writes poetry and her adored father Roland is near enough a fantasy figure – handsome, clever (he’s an academic), a pacifist who once went to jail for his views and who’s now a CND activist. Roland is indulgently permissive in dealing with Ginger’s uncertainly rebellious behaviour. Her mother Natalie, an artist manqué, is an anxious spoilsport for whom Ginger and her father share an impatient contempt. Ginger’s best – it seems her only – friend is Rosa. They don’t go to the same school because Rosa failed her eleven plus but they’re otherwise inseparable: according to the Wikipedia synopsis of the film, they ‘discuss religion, politics and hairstyles, and dream of lives bigger than their mothers’ frustrated domesticity’. ‘Daddy’ is probably Sylvia Plath’s most famous poem, and certainly her most notoriously autobiographical one, but she didn’t imagine a crisis for her Electra as florid as the one that Sally Potter comes up with here. As the skies of Ginger’s world continue to darken, Roland moves out of the family home and starts a relationship with Rosa. While the world holds its breath over Cuba, Ginger learns from Rosa that she’s carrying Roland’s baby.
The introduction to the Time Out review of the film online summarises it as follows:
‘In Sally Potter’s latest drama two teenage girls, Ginger and Rosa – born on same day in 1945 when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima – come of age as London starts to swing.’
Although she’s explicit that the nuclear age, Ginger and Rosa are exact contemporaries, Potter still tries to be imprecise about how old the two girls are. Ginger is played by fourteen-year-old Elle Fanning, Rosa by Alice Englert (Jane Campion’s daughter), who’s making her screen debut but is in fact four years older than Fanning. In an early scene the two friends sit facing each other in a bath, shrinking their jeans: Rosa is reading the comic Girl, Ginger a book with Simone de Beauvoir’s name on the cover. You feel that neither Ginger nor Rosa – girls who are proud of being intelligently ‘different’ – would be seen dead reading Girl, even for a laugh, but Potter’s priority is presumably to remind the audience of the cultural importance of Girl during the 1950s and (slightly) beyond. Ginger’s age weakens the basis of the film. If she’s seventeen in August 1962 the seemingly recent arrival of death in her mental life is not only unremarkable but verging on retarded. Elle Fanning seems younger than seventeen, though, and I think that Potter wanted it that way. She herself was thirteen in 1962 and she may be drawing on her own memories in Ginger & Rosa. More important, Fanning’s early adolescence makes Ginger’s fear more poignant and the sexual element in her feelings about her father less challenging. In contrast, the fact that Alice Englert looks her age makes Roland’s affair with Rosa less shocking than it might otherwise be. (Ginger & Rosa turns out to be topical in another and unforeseen way, however, and Roland’s having sex with a minor to be unfortunately resonant. Potter’s impeccably cool selection of music includes ‘The Man I Love’, which some of us won’t easily forget was the theme tune to the radio show Savile’s Travels.)
Sally Potter’s screenplay is full of purplish, statement-making dialogue. She increasingly ridicules Roland through the silver-tongued crap that he talks but it’s not easily distinguishable from what issues from the mouths of other, more sincere characters – even if some of the actors in smaller roles are good enough to disguise this, Timothy Spall and Annette Bening particularly. Spall is one of Ginger’s two gay godfathers (Oliver Platt is the other). I didn’t really get who Bening’s character was but with the spectacles she wears she must be meant to be an intellectual of sorts. It’s frustrating that the writing of the character of Roland makes him so transparent from an early stage: Alessandro Nivola has a subtlety that could have kept things in doubt for much longer. Potter delays the conflict between Ginger and Rosa artificially and there are some implausible bits of plotting. Literally following in her father’s footsteps at a CND rally, Ginger appears to be the only person arrested at it – presumably so that she can then have a scene in a police cell. Sally Potter isn’t known for realism and she may well despise it – yet any impact that Ginger & Rosa has depends almost entirely on the viewer’s believing in the realness of Ginger’s experiences. Truth created through realistic acting is what Potter gets from Elle Fanning but it’s diluted by the writer-director’s failure to place Ginger in a credible situation. Jodhi May is Rosa’s mother; as Ginger’s, Christina Hendricks seems uncomfortable not only with an English accent but with the character as a whole yet she has some oddly affecting moments.
21 October 2012
