The Girl

The most successful part of The Girl is its cool and sexy jazz soundtrack. And I don’t like jazz.

Jokes aside, the music really does help elevate a pretty flimsy story. The Girl relies on cliche and vibes. It’s the sort of movie where the main characters don’t get names. The character who provides us with voiceover is known as “The Artist.” She picks up a beautiful and seductive singer for a night of lesbian sex. This turns into an affair and The Artist dubs her partner as The Girl. But other people are interested in The Girl. There’s also The Man. The Man has a pre-existing relationship with The Girl. It’s later revealed he’s pretty much her pimp. He’s also got a possessive streak. He tells The Girl to stop seeing The Artist. But contrary and rebellious as she is, The Girl just starts seeing The Artist even harder.

For the first 40 minutes or so, I was enjoying The Girl. The vibes of it all were strong enough to power the weak story. As some sort of standalone TV episode, this could’ve worked. But weak as The Girl’s story is, even the cool and sexy vibes can’t sustain it for a full movie runtime. Especially when the vibes stay more or less constant. They’re cool, yes. But after 40 minutes of the same sort of coolness, the novelty wears off. And they you’re just stuck watching some women with minimal character traits lounge naked while jazz plays. It’s not the worst fate, but it’s not exactly superior art either.

The weakness of character really is a problem. It is clearly an intentional choice. These characters are archetypes more than people. But again, it’s hard to sustain interest in a feature film if your characters are shallow archetypes. The Girl really proves that women too can reduce and dehumanize a woman. The film is written, directed and from the point of view of a woman. Yet still, there’s a distinct lack of interest in learning anything about the beautiful figure known as The Girl. Is she actually a mysterious enigma? Or is The Artist just more interested in thinking of her as such than she is in asking any sort of questions about The Girl?

The lack of information about each other is probably the basis of the relationship between The Artist and The Girl. No silly things like personal flaws and mundane facts to get in the way of their sexy romp. But as a viewer, I began looking for more. You can have a few sex scenes with no character depth. And the jazz soundtrack allowed for a few more before I reached a point of boredom and started hoping for these characters to become more than archetypes. But that point did happen. And it happened way before the end of the movie.

The Girl has style. And I respect that. There is definitely a point of view and solid execution of said point of view on display. But none of that was enough to sustain a full film. There’s not enough artistic commentary, themes or character work. So, then it’s just a sexy indie movie. Which again, it certainly is. But it’s also one that wears out its welcome halfway through because of the refusal to dig deeper into any aspect.

Overall rating: 4.6/10

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