White Bird In A Blizzard (2014) - Gregg Araki

Kat Connors is your typical 17 year-old teenager in the 1980s, living with her homemaker mother, Eve, and father, Brock.  A seemingly happy family on the surface, Eve is in actuality a repressed housewife who has fallen out of love with her harmless, unpassionate husband, Brock.  One day, seemingly out of nowhere, Kat’s mom, Eve, disappears without a trace.  An investigation begins into Eve’s disappearance with Kat barely being emotionally affected, a bi-product of growing up in an emotionally repressed household.  As time passes, Kat begins to come to grips with the affect her mother’s disappearance has on her, eventually confronting the truth and her own personal denial about what occurred.  Gregg Araki’s White Bird In A Blizzard is probably his most reserved film to-date.  It’s a coming of age story of sorts but what makes this film so effective is in its examination of repression.  All three family members in this film are dealing with some form of repression, from Eve struggling with domestication and feeling like a servant, to Kat’s repressed emotional state thanks to her upbringing. Through these three characters, including Brock’s repression which I won’t speak about for sake of spoilers, White Bird in a Blizzard shows the power and danger of repressing one’s emotions, capturing the volatility associated with trying to bottle it up.  Narrative-wise, I really enjoyed how the film subtlely showcases how Kat’s own repressed emotions and personal issues are similar to her mothers.  Kat rebels, especially sexually, almost as if to make sure she doesn’t follow her own mother’s doomed footsteps, afraid to face the potential truth.  As one would expect Eva Green is phenomenal in her role as Eve, displaying both an instability and vulnerability that makes the audience uncomfortable, simply waiting for her to explode.  Greg Araki’s White Bird In A Blizzard is certainly his most stylistically reserved and straight-forward film in a long time, but its thematic examination of repressed emotions is poignant and profound.  

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