Lily and Gerry are best friends, living in New York for one last summer before heading to college. On the eve of adulthood, the two form a pact to lose their virginity before leaving at the end of summer. The problem is they both end up developing a crush on David, a handsome artist. While Gerry pursues David, Lily begins to see him behind her back, testing a lifelong friendship in the process. Naomi Foner's Very Good Girls is painstakingly simplistic film about a complex subject which lacks complete subtlety in approach. Very Good Girls is a film that attempts to capture a young woman's perspective right of passage, virginity, but the way it tackles this ideal is very simplistic. Throughout the entire film it seemed that both Lily and Gerry were characters defined more by the supporting characters around them then themselves, not feeling nearly as genuine as they needed to be for this type of film. While this is a major problem, it's worth noting that Dakota Fanning & Elizabeth Olsen give strong performances, making these characters sympathetic and interesting no matter the short-comings of the screenplay. On the otherhand, Boyd Holbrook is an incredibly poor actor, who makes the whole love triangle incredibly hard to care about. The story-line itself is a hodgepodge of every dramatic beat one could think of in this type of film, lacking nearly all originality. In the end, the biggest problem with Naomi Foner's Very Good Girls is how bland and generic it is, never taking the necessary risks to make it stand out from the other films of this variety. If you want to see a truly impressive film about a similar thematic subject that presents a genuine and effective portrait of adolescence watch Eliza Hittman's It Felt Like Love.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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