So many young women in American independent cinema, who struggle with patriarchy and its violence, under the eye of the camera! It has become a trope, a motif so common that when reading the synopses we are frankly suspicious and we doubt: when good genre cinema will have been put through the mill of its beautiful lights and its gentle morals for years throughout the feminist theory and struggle, we will say thank you… The many – too many – films that I see tend to comfort me in this distrust but that said, I sometimes let myself be surprised, and that was the case with one film released yesterday at the cinema, and who is called Good One.
The film is by India Donaldson, a young director, herself the daughter of a filmmaker, for whom this is her first feature film. It takes place during a weekend of hiking in the forest in the Catskills region north of New York – a moment in nature, far from the tumult of the city, work, smartphones, between a father and his 17-year-old daughter, Sam, but also with the first's best friend. Two adult men, therefore, white, rather bourgeois – one – the father, quite into everything that is a hiking gadget and organizing backpacks, the other – the friend much less so, a little depressed by his divorce and failure to get along with his teenage son. And in the middle, this young girl who observes them, listens to them, sometimes participates in the conversations. On paper – poster and trailer included – it scares me: a young female director + a young girl in shorts + the beauty of the landscapes + a butterfly on a branch + two boomers + slightly eighties music = the promise of a film which compiles pure zeitgeist in an hour and a half, potentially immediately seen immediately forgotten.
Point of view
Well Good One surprised me it is not the expected product, it progresses very delicately, without any didacticism, in very fair and well interpreted dialogues in particular by this young actress called Lily Collias. The film depicts a difference both generational and sexual without making a big deal, and instills risk and unease with a rather remarkable sense of rhythm, up to a final scene in a car that I find particularly striking. ambiguity.
It made me think of another last scene which takes place in a car, where another young girl also found herself with a man: Anora, the heroine of the film of the same name, released two weeks ago, winner of gold, a much more grandiloquent flagship of American indie cinema. The films are very different, but I still used them to understand why Good One I liked: here is a film which looks at its heroine without any overhang, unlike Anora and a whole bunch of other female characters who sometimes find themselves crushed by stories which, in undoubtedly wanting to emancipate them, overdetermine them.
Yesterday I saw probably one of the worst films of the year, it's called Dadit comes out at the beginning of December, and it's still a young woman in a car, to whom an old taxi driver, alias Sean Penn who seems to imitate Sylvester Stallone, learns about life in an hour and forty hours journey from an airport to her house, and simply shows her the way to be happier as a woman and not to be fooled by men like him. Champion.
What is beautiful in Good One it's the point of view, it's how he sticks to his character, and doesn't let go, even if Sam speaks little, even if we don't know what his face, with its often indefinable expression, expresses: the director gives in nothing to the didacticism of the feminist fable, she simply follows in its tracks, as a hiker too, and when the film ends, something absolutely undecidable remains, a sway between the soft and the serious, which can also be an abyss, and there is something of the feminine experience which is represented in a much finer and deeper way at the same time.
