Ginger & Rosa (2013)
Average Rating: 6.7/10
Reviews Counted: 100
Fresh: 79 | Rotten: 21
Elle Fanning gives a terrific performance in this powerful coming-of-age tale about a pair of teenage girls whose friendship is unnerved by the threat of nuclear war.
Average Rating: 7.7/10
Critic Reviews: 28
Fresh: 25 | Rotten: 3
Elle Fanning gives a terrific performance in this powerful coming-of-age tale about a pair of teenage girls whose friendship is unnerved by the threat of nuclear war.
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Average Rating: 3.3/5
User Ratings: 5,096
Movie Info
London, 1962. Two teenage girls - GINGER & ROSA - are inseparable. They skip school together, talk about love, religion and politics and dream of lives bigger than their mothers' domesticity. But the growing threat of nuclear war casts a shadow over their lives. Ginger (Elle Fanning) is drawn to poetry and protest, while Rosa (Alice Englert) shows Ginger how to smoke cigarettes, kiss boys and pray. Both rebel against their mothers: Rosa's single mum, Anoushka (Jodhi May), and Ginger's frustrated
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Cast
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Elle Fanning
Ginger -
Alice Englert
Rosa -
Jodhi May
Anoushka -
Christina Hendricks
Natalie -
Annette Bening
Bella -
Alessandro Nivola
Roland -
Oliver Platt
Mark -
Timothy Spall
Mark
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Ginger & Rosa Trailer & Photos
All Critics (100) | Top Critics (28) | Fresh (79) | Rotten (21)
Coming from anyone else, Ginger & Rosa would be a sensitive if predictable coming-of-age tale set in the mists of the distant past. But coming from writer-director Sally Potter, it's a major surprise.
Top CriticA near-flawless film, beautifully shot and cut, excitingly performed and deeply felt.
Fanning is nearly perfect as Ginger navigates choppier waters than most teens have to. There is not a false note in her performance; no matter how melodramatic things become, everything about Ginger remains genuine.
Elle Fanning is scary. Scarily good.
In all respects, this is the completely captivating Fanning's picture.
Potter has a rich compositional eye, but she wisely trims the fat from the dialogue, which dances around most of the melodrama until an explosive last act.
As good as the movie is performance-wise, [director Sally] Potter allows the pacing to drag frequently, meaning viewers must be patient with Ginger & Rosa.
The complexity of the characters and the simplicity of the story balance out to a rewarding coming-of-age drama for adults.
With a rich sense of lived experience, Potter first portrays the blithe excitement and sense of joyful conspiracy shared by the two friends.
...probably Potter's most accessible movie to date, but the script is perhaps nothing special ...
Nuclear anxiety becomes a distraction from teenage pressures and a projection of potentially explosive emotional distress in this beautifully acted character drama.
The gifted Elle Fanning turns in an extraordinary performance, although Sally Potter's film is otherwise built on a flimsy, soap-opera story.
Assured but bleak art-house girl's coming-of-age film that combines politics and personal matters.
Despite some narrative missteps, Ginger & Rosa should be seen simply for Fanning's exceptional performance, the sort of revelatory turn that makes us feel as if the next generation of film is in capable hands.
Fanning -- a startlingly alert and microemotive young actress -- breathes real feeling into the part, while the jazz soundtrack (John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sidney Bechet) rouses this sensitive film from its drowsier inclinations.
Fanning heartbreakingly expresses hurt with seemingly with every fiber of her being. Her family implodes as much as the world seems about to during those 13 days in October.
Fanning brings such a groundedness and authenticity to the film's central role that you stick with her every step of the way.
"Ginger & Rosa" is another one of those films that feels like it's attempting to cover too much, and by doing so, ends up spreading itself rather thin across all of the areas it tries to encompass.
Even seemingly ordinary scenes of girlfriends bonding - ironing hair, wearing jeans in the bathtub to shrink them, hitchhiking - are fraught with the sense of the external forces that will divide them.
The great gift of Ginger & Rosa is Potter's willingness to let her camera observe these gifted young actresses without judgment, and to create the illusion of ordinary life unfolding before your eyes.
Without turning sentimental or heavy-handed, Potter strikes a nice balance between the more intimate character moments and the broader political context, and Fanning is terrific as the girl caught in the middle.
Ginger's teen angst could have easily become mopey or self-righteous, but Fanning stays true to the heart of her character even as her world is crumbling around her.
Audience Reviews for Ginger & Rosa
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
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- Ginger: I loved you Rosa. Don't you see? But we are different, you dream of everlasting love. Not me. Because what really matters is to live. And if we do, there will be nothing to forgive. But I'll forgive you anyway.
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- Ginger: When we were born, for some it was the end. Now it seems there may not be tomorrow. But despite the horror and the sorrow, I love our world. I want us all to live.
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Foreign Titles
- Ginger & Rosa (DE)
- Ginger and Rosa (UK)
While Rosa has never really known her father, Ginger has Roland(Alessandro Nivola) as her father, as he prefers to be known to her, when he is not sleeping elsewhere which includes his boat. As Roland puts it, he refused to enter the military during World War II, and was jailed for his beliefs, the worst part being in solitary, but is too self-righteous to wonder why people did not act differently than he did.
Ever since her first feature, the classic "Orlando," Sally Potter's films have sadly been a prime case of diminishing returns. With her latest, the evocative, yet flawed "Ginger & Rosa" which moves to its own syncopated rhythm to match the jazz records on the soundtrack, she arrests that trend somewhat by thoughtfully exploring the connection between the personal and the political while not being the first person to conflate nuclear family and nuclear explosions. By having another red-headed protagonist who seeks to be a poet, Potter is saying there is nothing greater to fear than being alone at a time in 1962 when the world was facing nuclear annihilation, which concerned citizens responded with protests in England.
Note to self: get a jazz band for the next protest.