LADY BIRD
Greta Gerwig presents a masterful debut feature film that portrays something as big as mother-daughter love
The day Lady Bird is leaving for collage she receives a letter that says: “When I got pregnant with you, it was a miracle because I was older.” Although her mother did not dare to give her the letter, neither that one nor the other thirty she has written, her father has picked them up from the trash, ordered them and hid them in her suitcase. She also didn’t want to say goodbye at the airport but then she cried in the car like someone who sees the love of their life leave. Well, that is what Greta Gerwig’s feature debut is about, the mother-daughter love and the anxiety of separation.
It is a film with an exquisite script, the cinematography is gorgeous and the color so measured that it transports you to a nostalgic 2003. In addition, Lady Bird gets excellent, moving performances from its supporting characters such as Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges or Timonthée Chamalet. Saoirse Ronan is sensational as Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, a difficult teen
Lady Bird starts with quote from Joan Didion about Sacramento, the city in which the two artists were born and grew up. Gerwig mentioned on numerous occasions that discovering that fact was an experience of spiritual significance for her. Until then she had always thought that art was only about big and important things. Didion had shown her that she could write about whatever she wanted, the essential thing was to be a good observer.
But what makes it so good? The story is apparently simple; just a teenager, Lady Bird, who has boy and school trouble, and who loves her mom, though they fight each other a lot. Even though everything in a relationship is heavy and complex it is framed as simple. It captures the essence of life so efficiently and that’s why it is so great. Lady Bird translates into cinema the crystalline and deep prose of the Californian scene. Gerwig proves once again that the simple and clear narrative is not worse than the wired one, especially since the film already takes care of it by itself. For example, in the delicious sequences in which Laurie Metcalf drives on quiet roads full of sun and Jon Brion plays the piano. Nor is it hard to imagine why her debut feature is a tribute to Sacramento, a city that Lady Bird dreams of abandoning during her last school year and whose rejection serves as a thread to fight with her mother at all hours (also when they go shopping, a classic).
To become Christine McPherson, Lady Bird has to fall in love several times, learn how to value what it means to live on the other side of the train tracks, lose virginity loudly, defraud and gain back her best friend and hate Sacramento to be able to value it from New York. As much as the love of her mother, intense, complex and demanding in the vicinity, but unbeatable, real and tender from afar.
