by The Lithuanian first director Saue Bliuvaite makes a real impression with this impressively traded and elegantly composed feature in the hard suburbs of Kaunas, in which young girls dream of escaping an international model career. Bliuvaite and her cameraman Vyttta Katkus could create striking tableaus and surrounding setpieces for this drama an emotional context: a world of alienation and desperate need, but also resistant humor. It is a disturbing essay in sexuality, poverty and sexual capital that reminded me a little bit of Ninja Thyberg’s pleasure and Isabella Eklöf vacation in his open, academic evocation of the young female body and its susceptibility to the exploitation of weight loss. Bliuvaites style reminded me of the Austrians Ulrich Seidl and Jessica Hausner – the latter was the president of the jury, who awarded this film the main prize at the Last year’s Locarno Film Festival.
Newcomer Vesta Matsel plays Marija, a shy girl who goes back and forth due to a disability. She has to live with her grandma while her mother fixes her relationship problems. After being bullied in her new school, she gets up and finally gets friends with a girl who had tried to steal her jeans in the swimming pool cover room. This is Kristina (Ieva Ruppeikaite), and together these two react to an advertisement for an audition of “modeling school” that promises to send winners on fashion trips in the Far East and the USA. However, you have to pay for your photo shoots and other non -specified administrative costs in advance, and your parents have to sign a contract that enables your daughters to work for nothing until the “debts” are paid. It is clearly abusive and exploitative at a certain level, since the central girls have to fall back on obvious measures to pay these initial fees. However, it may be no more fraud than the rest of the supposedly legitimate “modeling recruitment business”.
There are dark, subordinate touches in the Mortage Camerwork. We are often put in Longshot in terms of action or sometimes directly over the head so that we can enjoy this empty context. Marija wears a Marilyn Manson-T-Shirt (the director leaves it to us to think about the current associations of Celebrity) and Kristina’s amiable father Sarunas (Giedrius Savickas)-to help his daughter, who is necessary to go from this dark place-a “Queen Elizabeth. The truth is that Marija and Kristina is Hardly more than children are, and to observe witness Kristina who get tongue piercing or is a tapeworm parasite for weight loss (cheaper than Ozempic), it is to observe terrible damage or self-harm.
In a regular basis, Bliuvaite will show us the young women who practice the catwalk for the dark wardrobes, silence 10 or 20 steps forward and stop with a hip jut, the swivel and sashaying back-a stylized choreography of compulsion and misfortune. It is a very stylish work.
• To be poisonous on Mubi from July 25th.
