Star turn: Maisy Stella in ‘My Old Ass’.
MY OLD ASS ***1/2 (89 minutes) MA
Wisdom born of experience clashes with the impulses driven by the lack of it in the warm, touching, cheeky fantasy-tinged romantic dramedy My Old Ass.
Elliott (Maisy Stella) is a teenage girl happily on the brink of leaving the family berry farm, which she considers jejune, for the far more adventurous terrain of college.
While enjoying a mushroom high, Elliott is visited by a middle-aged woman (Aubrey Plaza) casually claiming to be her older self on a mission to begift a nugget of life-altering advice.
Elliott the Younger is adamantly told to avoid a boy called Chad, but when the attractive, slightly goofy guy (Percy Hynes White) shows up, she struggles to resist his slacker charms, even though she has only found fondness with girls up until this point in her adolescence.
Set mostly amidst the greenery and glittering waterways of rural Canada, the film explores with a blend of earthy humour and drama at the collision of braggish youth with hard life choices.
Most effectively roused by writer/director Megan Park is the daring suggestion that homespun values can actually hold meaning in the modern world, even for an impetuous 18-year-old.
Without pushing matters, the film is graced by the over-arching theme of appreciating what you have and of never taking things for granted. (Cue Joni Mitchell and Big Yellow Taxi.)
Unlike too many films running through cinemas of late, the story feels thoroughly thought through as Elliott takes incremental steps from being a snarky and dismissive teen archetype to a more self-aware, slightly more mature adult, realizing what she has and what she is about to lose.
One exceptionally well-handled sequence has her reassessing her attitude to the family business. A fine, subtle example of the pain pinned to character growth, it’s a key moment that makes the movie.
Performances are strong throughout – likeable, believable and full of nuance. Aubrey Plaza is fabulous as usual, again showing her range goes far beyond April from Parks and Recreation (see her in Best Sellers and Emily the Criminal for further evidence of this).
Percy Hynes White is very good as the borderline goofball romantic, but it’s Maisy Stella (Nashville) who is the stand out, ably carrying the film on her slender shoulders.
Provided the term “normie” has now grown from being a toothless insult to a more balanced way to refer to people with conventional, mainstream values, the film possesses one key aspect that “normies” will appreciate.
Namely, that though the film has gay characters in it, it somehow – perhaps miraculously – doesn’t play as a “gay film”.
That Elliott is a lesbian is seen as just a normal, unexceptional part of her character and of the narrative; that she begins having feelings for a boy is presented as an element in her growing up rather than as some deep crisis of sexual identity.
How pleasing and refreshing it is that the film is free of the politicking we usually see stapled to anything with a gay theme. The focus here is purely on people, as it should be, rather than identity politics.
The film is not without its stumbles. A fantasy skit about Justin Bieber is clumsy and the phrase “what the f***” is spouted way too many times. Yes, it’s a common phrase but hearing it so often gets a tad tiring. (Perhaps they could have gone with “what the darn” a few times. A-ha-ha.)
All up, a terrific movie.
A DIFFICULT YEAR ** (120 minutes; subtitled) M
Initially motivated by the offer of free catering, two cash-strapped middle-aged gents are drawn into an environmental protest movement that they discover can be used for their own ends. As Bruno and Albert, Jonathan Cohen and Pio Marmaï inject some comic energy into the friends-in-debt premise, but this socially-minded French comedy doesn’t really get going until it hits its second hour. It’s too long a haul, the latest example of a lukewarm film that would have been hotter if it was shorter. There really ought to be a law that any comedy longer than 98 minutes should require special dispensation from the secretary of the Department of Sensible Running Times.