Review by Beatrice On 27-Jun-2023
Woman on par with man is her own body but her body is a different thing from her
Lea is 17 years old and spends her days in a boring and repetitive way.
She sunbathes with a friend, spends evenings with schoolmates, and performs her adolescent sexual "duties" apathetically.
Her father lives in Arizona, and her mother is always struggling with her postrelationship depressions, which affect her work, her existence, and her relationship with her daughter.
The latter criticizes her mother's attitude so supine to more or less gratifying relationship dynamics, often finding herself at odds with her and not tolerating the harassing annoyance she causes during the night when she entertains herself with the boyfriend of the day.
One evening, while hanging out with her BFF and her usual companions, she has to run out of the place where they have been consuming junky food because the males decide not to pay.
A man, the same man who had reserved a wink for her on leaving the club, sticks up for her and offers to drive her home.
Lea is rather wary at first but then lets go of a feeling that takes over: in fact, 34-year-old Tom manages to completely win her trust and attraction by skillfully and unscrupulously building a condition of dependence.
Despite early warnings Lea leaves no room for innuendo and suspicion and soon finds herself in a situation enormously larger than herself.
A film that skillfully structures its own dynamic of building expectation and curiosity...
Lea has her own personality, she sees what she does not like, she is bored, and she is going through the most chaotic period of her life, yet the viewer cannot imagine what her choices and renunciations will be.
The screenplay therefore takes its time to describe and witness the experience the young woman is going through especially as she grapples with a promised love, a different life, and a feeling that overrides any self-preservation instinct that is based on self-love.
A time that at times comes across as distressing and redundant though nevertheless inevitable to accompany the viewer on the descent into that life actually encountered by the girl and so many women in everyday existence.
"Love" as an object of exchange and as the only possibility of survival where above all it has always been absent.
A film of tragic denunciation of male/female relations, where the body is a vehicle of conquest, blackmail and subordination.
the male in his psychological poverty is usually an "identity" that establishes relationships, mostly in the male sphere where he continues to play war in the form of competition, or sex in the form of occasional seduction, the woman tends to be a "relationship" from which she derives her recognition and thus her identity
And this is the condemnation to which many women subject themselves, in spite of everything.
And this film is a tragic representation of it.
Find it on IMDB: IMDb Page: Palm trees and power lines27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice