A different kind of coming of age movie
The trailer for Sundance entry The Fits dropped today, and Jezebel has a write up for it that sounds so GOOD it’s almost like we concocted the movie from an office Madlib.
“[Royalty] Hightower portrays Toni, a powerful tween boxer training at her brother’s gym in West Cincinnati, who becomes mesmerized with the dance troupe working out next door. According to the synopses, she joins them and, as she surrounds herself with women and gender imperatives for the first time, ‘grapples with her individual identity amid her newly defined social sphere.’”
One ticket to an abstract portrait of adolescent identity with a narrative about gender non-conformity—packaged within a dance movie—please!
The movie was written, directed and produced by Anna Rose Holmer, who has done those duties on various shorts, music videos and documentary projects. But this is her first feature length film and it looks magnetic. In its Sundance Film Festival review, Variety said that Holmer, “crafts a meticulous mood of psychological isolation and beguiling mystery through her metaphorical tale, which exhibits less interest in traditional dramatic conventions than in situating viewers in its protagonist’s particular headspace.”
And twitchfilm puts the work in a greater pop culture context by saying, “The last two years have given us wild and canonical moments of unfettered young women overtaken by the magic of youth intersecting into adulthood: Rihanna's "Diamonds" sung in blue light in Girlhood, the acid scene in Diary of a Teenage Girl, and now Toni's Rocky-moment on a bridge in The Fits. Each give us new and vital moments of girlhood on the cusp of young womanhood that is as frightening as it is poetic.”
Give us all the teen angst and yearning for a sense of emotional place. Give it to us all day.
Share on Facebook
