Lady Bird

It is common opinion that in the last 20 years cinema has lost the power and auteurism that had always distinguished the seventh art in the various phases of its history.
Leaving aside the validity or otherwise of this metropolitan legend, we can attest that in the last two years cinema seems to have given not only great films but also new great authors.

Think of very young rising stars like Damien Chazelle and Xavier Dolan, passing through Martin McDonagh and Jordan Peele.

It's enough to take a look at the 10 titles that have populated the nominations for best film for the 2018 Oscar to realize that we are facing a particularly flourishing and inspired period for cinematography. Three Posters in Ebbing Missouri has undoubtedly been the masterpiece of the last 12 months, with Shape Of Water enchanting and Dunkirk exploding in theatres in all its power. A lot of auteur cinema thanks to the wonderful Il Filo Nascosto and Call Me By Your Name, a lot of history with The Darkest Hour and The Post, up to the strange Yellow Horror of Get Out.

To accompany these excellent films there is also a first feature film from Sacramento, born in 1983 and competing for Best Director at the last Oscars.

The film is called Lady Bird and the woman behind it all is Greta Gerwig.

The film is set in Sacramento in 2008 and stars a lively, eccentric and problematic young teenager, but full of dreams and ambitions too big for the provincial mentality of Sacramento.

If you're seeing traces of self-quotation, you're on the right track because LadyBird is essentially a novel of formation starring Greta Gerwig herself.

To make the story exceptional is the actress who embodies Christine, aka Lady Bird, aka Greta Gerwig is an incredible Saorsie Ronan, also deservedly obliterated in the Oscar for the third time despite being only 24 years after her nominations for Atonement and Brooklyn.

For those of you who don't know Ronan, this could be the movie that will never make you forget her again. The New Yorker actress appears sparkling, unabashed but at the same time inwardly fragile and stubborn just like her mother Marion played by an exceptional Laurie Meltclaf here at life's acting test, which earned her a 2018 Oscar nomination, the first of her career.

Just because something looks bad,
doesn't mean it's morally wrong.

The mother-daughter relationship will be one of the cornerstones of the whole film, a relationship that not surprisingly opens and closes the film showing us a relationship as complicated as it is loving. A love that does not pass through kisses, cuddles, caresses and permissiveness, but rather is articulated on exchanges that are often hard, severe and unpleasant, but which hide a desire to create a life full of principles and affection, based on an enviable but never rigid education and an acknowledgement of one's own means as a viaticum for the acceptance of oneself and one's role in the world.

And it is precisely here that Christine finds the clash with her mother and the desire to escape from little Sacramento. The young girl has a rebellious spirit that pushes her to refuse to be called by her baptismal name in favor of a chosen name of her own, Lady Bird, which represents both a break with her roots and emancipation as a little woman.

Because if something this film wants to claim is the will, the courage, the determination of strong and dreamy women who, in order to put themselves at stake and self-determination, are willing to put themselves in uncomfortable situations even with the people they love and above all are able to understand the decisive role of those same people.

Lady Bird is not, therefore, "only" a novel of formation but it's also an all-female story that rejects the already seen embracing instead more desecrating and nosy tones. It does so through the protagonist and her story, but looking beyond, looking to the future, looking at the consequences of that choice that lead to maturity first, then emancipation and the realization of one's dreams, culminating in the birth of this film and its success. Yet another quality product that tries to talk about feminism and emancipation by rejecting every cliché, vibrating in the air like a bird, through the eyes of the inimitable Lady Bird.

People quietly accept a name that was given to them by their parents but then are not free to believe in God!?