Lonergan was rightly praised for You Can Count on Me (2000), his truthful, low-key debut about a single mother coping with a difficult brother and a guilty affair in small-town New England. He had troubles with this ambitious second feature, completed in 2007 and only now released after much re-editing. It's set in a troubled, divided, post-9/11 New York where a clever 17-year-old girl, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), is at odds with her divorced mother, a neurotic, off-Broadway actress, who has embarked on an affair with a rich businessman (Jean Reno).
The confused Lisa takes a contrarian approach to all classroom discussions at the private school she attends, clashing particularly with a Syrian girl and she flirts with and seduces a sympathetic maths teacher. Her real problem is a Holden Caulfieldesque contempt for the compromises in adult life, which she challenges by first giving false evidence about a road accident she witnesses and then conducting a vindictive campaign to destroy the bus driver responsible.
The movie is poorly focused and Lonergan cannot have intended for his young heroine to be as insufferable and self-righteous as she appears in this version. It is nevertheless an intelligent, thoughtful film, the title of which comes from the "Margaret" addressed in Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" about growing up and growing old.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/dec/04/margaret-anna-paquin-review
Alejandro Springall Aleksandr Dovzhenko Aleksandr Sokurov Aleksei Balabanov
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