Yvonne: We've realized why Deborah and I have such extraordinary telepathy and why people treat us and look at us the way they do. It is because we are mad! We are both stark raving mad!
Never have I seen a more accurate depiction of the rich and turbulent inner lives of teenage girls. It gets so many things right:
• the sheer
depth of feeling girls experience: joy and anger and deep sadness and longing and contemptuous hatred
• the whirlwind nature of young friendships— silly and carefree and fun; lots of laughter over jokes that don't make much sense, bonding over the same interests (fandom!) with an intensity that's strange to everyone else. And beyond sisterhood, the blurred lines of mutual affection in a period of self-discovery... in short, lesbian experimentation
• the constant fighting between mothers and daughters was very realistic... I had flashbacks to my
own spats with my mother.
Mr. Hulme: Your daughter appears to have developed a rather unwholesome attachment to Juliet.
Mrs. Rieper: What's she done?
Mr. Hulme: She hasnt done anything. It's the intensity of the friendship that concerns me.
Yvonne, who recommended the film to me (not the character herself) told me about
Folie à deux, a syndrom involving shared delusions in close and intimate friendships. It's really fascinating to think about, and tragic too. I feel awful for Mrs. Rieper, who despite their fighting did love her child :(( All the same I feel some measure of sympathy for the girls as well. I don't know if anyone could have done anything to prevent the girls from falling down this path and doing something irreversible.
The depiction of homosexuality as a passing phase of mental affliction in this film was funny to me until I realized this was the lived reality for many :(( Yvonne and Juliet's families were lenient about it, but others must have suffered worse. The parents really missed the forest for the trees, though. In a way they
were right to be concerned about the girls' codependency— not because of their daughters' homosexual tendencies but because of the latent violence of their fantasies.
This was a really compelling film despite the disturbing subject. The opening scene was already gripping. The slow slide from normalcy to obsession was so well-done I forgot about the opening scene until Yvonne started gleefully plotting Mrs. Rieper's murder. All of the actors were great. The final scene with Mrs. Rieper screaming as they killed her was gut-wretching, followed by Yvonne and Pauline crying as they envisioned themselves being torn apart. And then came the post-scripts to remind me that everything that happened was based on a true story :(( It's a haunting finish to what I initially thought hought would be a simple coming of age story.
___
Only after watching did I realize the irony of finishing a movie about matricide on Mother's Day... this was a product of pure circumstance though I love my mother dearly </3
