Two teenage girls - Ginger (Elle Fanning) and Rosa (Alice Englert) - are inseparable: they play truant together, discuss religion, politics and hairstyles, and dream of lives bigger than their mothers' frustrated domestici... more »ty. But, as the Cold War meets the sexual revolution, and the threat of nuclear holocaust escalates, the lifelong friendship of the two girls is shattered by the clash of desire and the determination to grow up.
London, the early 1960s: the times they are a-changin' just enough to confuse the heck out of two teenage friends. Ginger and Rosa are testing out the boundaries of what they can do with their new power as young women, a passage that is even harder on them than it is on their parents. In director Sally Potter's elliptical style, we see glimpses of blunders made and causes adopted--the latter become especially pressing at the height of atomic anxiety, as the Cuban missile crisis looms large in this scenario. Yet even that can't eclipse the knotty personal problems our protagonists endure. A soap opera-ish development in Rosa's love life doesn't tip the delicate balance of this movie's coming-of-age mood, and the cast is somehow unexpected and surprising (Christina Hendricks and Alessandro Nivola as Ginger's bohemian parents?) yet always right on. Along with the fine central performances by Fanning and the haunting Englert (she's the daughter of Jane Campion), there are deft supporting turns by Annette Bening, Timothy Spall, and Oliver Platt. What's most intriguing here is that Potter withholds judgment about all these folks, even the ones who make the biggest mistakes--a sign of wisdom and trust in the audience. Potter's previous work has leaned more in the experimental direction (Orlando and Yes, for instance), with uneven results. But this story of youth, which has just enough of Potter's unconventional approach to make it fresh, is a real winner. --Robert Horton« less