God knows how much I appreciate actress Elle Fanning. I'm glad that in this film, she was allowed to prove herself as a singer. Mission accomplished. But here ends the positive part about the movie.
Is it a bad movie? No, you can watch it.
Is it a good movie? No, because when you leave the theatre you have a sense of dissatisfaction. There are many problems, among all a plot that opens many narrative cues, eventually left unexplored.
The story is about a girl (Violet) who lives with her mother in a big house on the Isle of Wight, too big to be sustainable with their job as a waitress (part-time in the case of Violet, since she still goes to school) and a day-to-day caring of their greenhouse, fields and animals. Elle's dream is to sing but her mother (we discover she is Polish), a sort of "Born Again Christian" (but we are in the UK and not in the USA !!!), abandoned by her husband, does not want her daughter to waste time behind unrealizable dreams. The opportunity to fullfill her dreams came when the island host the selection camp to participate in programs such as The Voice (or X-Factor or ...). Violet secretly enlist herself to the trial using as a fake tutor Vlad, a former famous Yugoslavian opera singer now an alcoholist living in a van, who (we discover) would like to see his daughter, now living in Paris.
For the rest, the plot follows the traditional canons.
Beyond the plot with so many unaswerend questions, there is something strange about the casting.
This is English movie, set on an English island with supposedly english people. Then why on Earth did they decide to cast Elle (an all-American girl from Georgia) to play the role of the English daughter of a Polish woman instead of (just as an example because she is not of the right age) Mia Wasikowska? Her accent sound too strange to be an Island resident. The movie is a sort of Cinderella story coming from the English working class (not so different from the story of Flashdance)? What is the added value of using a Polish mother, Vlad, and the support band, whose selection is clearly driven from their non-english ethnicity?
Another problem in the representation of the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight. Violet's classmates (and young people in general) are 90% of non-British origin, while practically all adults are of English origin. Then we have a problem: either kids don't have parents or Wight residents don't have kids.
It seemed to me the classic trick to insert the "gray factor" to reach the goal of politically correctness (all race even when this don't make sense), something not strange in British movies in the last 5 years.
That's to bad because the movie had a lot of potential, but either film-script or the director (or both) failed in the task
Review of Teen Spirit
Teen Spirit
(2018)
Good performance for Elle but is movie heading to nowhere
14 September 2019
Warning: Spoilers