Review by Beatrice On 30-Dec-2023
Time spent badly during youth is sometimes the only freedom a person ever has.
Tara, sister Skye and friend Em land in Heraklion, Greece, for a wild vacation.
They are three rather swaggering British girls and plan to have fun, dance, get high and have sex: for Tara it would be her first time.
Arriving in the town of Malia, they take possession of their room, have a terrace overlooking the pool, and quickly get acquainted with their neighbors, two guys and a girl.
Shot after shot, drink after drink, chips and vomit galore.
Techno parties in the pool filled with hot teenagers, games with childish, vulgar and anything but erotic sexual innuendo..
The results of the GCSE ( General Certificate of Secondary Education, a kind of maturity of English students at about age 16) award Em, deemed a semi-genius, Skye but not Tara who will have to retake the exam: the very one who has to put her body to the most intimate test..
While neighbor Badger woos her without exaggeration, Paddy has no qualms about taking advantage of Tara's inexperienced and unprepared naiveté to say NO.
He takes her to the beach and here the irreversible happens, so much so that the teenager is left confused and spends the night with a group of boys and girls who offer her company.
The next day she seeks the gaze of the seducer who left her alone after the nonconsensual relationship, but he skillfully ignores her.
Although her friend Em notices her discomfort, Tara says nothing: she does not want to feel inadequate and out of place, considering the exaggerated, superficial, and thoughtless fun of everyone else..
After her further "encounter" with Paddy, Tara is increasingly absorbed and distant: that bright, smiling, fearless, boyish face that had accompanied her on vacation has been transformed, and the return journey will inevitably be different from the outward journey.
Adolescence, fun, high are not directly proportional to the journey understood as a rite of passage to the experience with one's own body, subjected to violent rhythms and ginned up and foiled.
The theme of consent, of sexual difference, of contemporaneity seemingly so free and yet conditioned by the pressing rhythms of conformity to the group and social image.
That precarious phase of existence that is adolescence, where the barely sketched-out identity is not played out as in the adult between what one is and the fear of losing what one is, but in the far more dramatic gap between not knowing who one is and the fear of not being able to be what one dreams of.
An existential explosion is what is experienced by the three girls each in their own way, each with personal disillusionment, need for recognition, attraction, seduction, abandonment, gender identity, fragility, inner conflicts, trauma.
A film for young women, to encounter something experienced or even unforeseen; about the impossibility of planning an encounter with one's body that does not and cannot know to what extent it is ready for the transition.
A film for young men to experience about what it means to relate to the other who is not just a body to be searched, penetrated, used but to be experienced; a body to be encountered, questioned, experienced.
Walker, with her debut work, reconstructs the standard vacation of today's youth, without any judgment, photographing, portraying, documenting the behavior, frenzies, desires, expectations, consumption, enjoyments and gender differences of the most elusive, unknowable, unpredictable and chaotic time in everyone's life.
She, a victim of sexual assault in her own time, decides to address, after a Cannes award-winning short, the theme of the unspoken: of those who cannot verbalize, process, explore the unknown of lived experiences for fear of judgment, misunderstanding, shame.
Use the refuge in reticence to stimulate reflection and dialogue on the theme of consent above all, of looking, of empathy, of caring.
For a terrible moment in his life an adolescent deceives himself; he believes he can deceive the world. He believes that he is invulnerable.
30-Dec-2023 by Beatrice