rilke's a dead giveaway

I can't recommend "Blue Car" highly enough.

It's an unflinching movie. A movie that allows the characters to be real and have sloppy relationships and flaws aplenty. It's not easy to watch in places. And it's sad, it has a lot of sadness in it. But it earns that sadness.

The main character is a teenage girl and this is a coming of age story. She sees her redemption from a troubled life in poetry, and especially in her English teacher. (I might mention here that the poetry is actually good, something which is almost never the case in a movie where one of the characters is a poet.)

One of the things that is strongest is how precarious everything feels. At any moment, Meg (played amazingly by Agnes Bruckner) could just become untethered from anything safe. No one's going to save her. Maybe not even herself. And that makes every action that happens dangerous, perilous and, also, brave.

This movie also handles an inappropriate relationship between an older person and a younger person with more honesty and complexity than I've seen in a long time. It's not easy to watch. But it does have some very powerful and important things to say about the kind of feelings vulnerable girls and women sometimes have for older men, without blindly demonizing men.

A decent interview with Karen Moncrieff about the movie here.

It makes me wish I could write small, intimate character drama.