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Reviews
You Can Say Vagina (2018)
Set adrift in a shallow pool
I found this film available online and was intrigued enough to give it a look. It's a film about a virginal and somewhat socially awkward young woman named Lucy who is in the midst of trying to launch a musical career at a time when she is becoming comfortable in her own skin sexually. When we meet her, she is existing in a vacuum, moving from place to place in a city where every new encounter with other people quickly takes a turn for the painfully uncomfortable and bizarre. The film brings us slowly into the full experience of her isolation. When we meet her, she's asleep on the floor of a public bathroom where she has spent the night. This tone, which initially alarms us turns into a stark emotional space that is slowly filled with the protagonists' unique determination, though never completely relieving us of a sense of danger. This mainly comes from the men she encounters, one of whom is her eccentric and much older male roommate, and the other who has convinced her to provide voice narration to audio descriptions of sexual encounters. Both ultimately prove to be essentially harmless, but the potential danger is implied throughout and the film is very effective in recruiting us to a sympathetic concern for its' main character.
This type of ambiguity, not just about how to feel, but how to interpret what we're seeing provides many of the film's complicated pleasures. Lucy is clearly uncomfortable and hiding much behind the nervous smile she wears throughout the movies' seventy odd minutes. It's a smile that takes on different connotations as it surfaces as different times; sometimes it's amusement or optimism, while other times, such as in a confrontation with her mother, it seems like more of a protective shield against her emotional vulnerability. We like Lucy and are easily brought along on her search, but wont get direct access to what is going on behind that smile until the film's final moments; until then wondering if this is a brave journey toward a greater purpose, or a desperate escape from something.
To give us a further sense of the free fall Lucy's life seems to be in, the film favors an unadorned and often times even bland style that favors lingering shots, slow movement, and mundane dialog. The meaning of the scene is not contained in it's words, and the viewer must be willing to put in the extra effort to engage with the film in order to gleam anything about what they're seeing. Neither explanatory, nor musical cues are there to help. To get a sense of it's tone, it brings to mind the movie Frances Ha, which is very similar thematically, being the tale of a young woman trying to find herself in the midst of a difficult career path and unwelcoming urban environment. It takes a sharp turn away from the polished surface of that film, however. When You Can Say Vagina gets laughs, it's typically the result of squirm inducing discomfort and not witty banter or animated quirkiness. We get more a sense of being part of Lucy's struggles rather than just to look in and observe, and wont be overtly offered any conclusions about them by the film itself. It's still executed in a traditional dramatic structure, however, establishing a tone that is neither cinema verite nor indie hipster comedy, but something that slightly echoes both.
It's uncool characters are one of the distinguishing traits that ends up making you want to take the film a little more seriously than the above mentioned Frances Ha. There's no bohemian avant garde angle to it all, Lucy is never pretentious or emblematic of any kind of starving artist, despite her ambitions becoming the narrative drive. She is simply a girl trying to take control of the forces spinning around her as she looks for a sense of home. After her vocational search has pulled her along through the sex recordings and the first inklings of erotic dance, things only get more complicated as her responses to her difficulties become challenges of their own, and it becomes a struggle just to find the room to grow or opportunity to safely fail. The film leaves us on an optimistic note, but not the resolution Lucy is yet looking for, and the search for her happy ending will continue. The slow plotting encumbers the film a little bit particularly at the beginning, but the pacing picks up as the film progresses to its' emotional conclusion. It's a very rewarding film for those willing to settle into the slow burn of this weird world.