Teenage girls Kim, Momo and Bella have been best friends since they were little girls. What unites them is not only the strength of such a lasting bond, but also their sexuality: they are in fact lesbians.
Everyone knows this at school and the girls are continually targeted by bullies, without the teachers doing anything to defend them: indeed they are often accused of being the cause of the discussions and fights in progress.
One day they discover a particular pollen from which a strange flower never seen before is born, whose nectar is able to transform them, with the arrival of the night, into boys. After the initial disorientation and surprise, they decide to exploit the situation to their advantage and are accepted by their peers, to whom they present themselves as newcomers to the city.
But Kim gets excessively carried away by the magical artifice and begins to ignore Momo and Bella: the cause of her isolation is love for rude Tony, a neighborhood bully who has always ignored her in female guise but now, as a male, begins to feel something about her.
To be or not to be
A strange movie this, directed in 2015 by Swedish director Alexandra-Therese Keining and adaptation of Jessica Schiefauer’s novel, which exploits so-called magical realism to explore sexual fluidity in modern times, using the fantastic element with higher ends. A concept certainly not new to certain auteur cinema, indeed lately more and more curious to fathom the limits of the possible through the impossible, here exposed in an original but not always completely convincing way.
Available in the Amazon Prime Video catalog, Girls Lost is in fact aware of the message they want to launch and the expedient of a flower from which to draw to complete one’s own identity desire is interesting both on paper and in actual application.
What is missing to make the story plausible even in its context is the attention to outline details: the parents of the protagonists are in fact evanescent elements, not at all worried that their daughters will spend whole nights away from home, and a couple of forcing peep out here and there to derail the story about thatbittersweet epilogue that opens up to new futures.
A matter of choices
The training course is also hasty and the excessive violence to which the young women are subjected in the first part, with the ruling class that further blames them, appear excessively marked.
Obviously it’s always right underline the psychological damage caused by homophobic behavior, but what immediately in the first half hour is exaggerated, slyly preparatory to the turning point that will give way to the fantasy side of the story.
The reactions of the characters, both main and secondary, in some situations are also not very credible, and this partly ruins the mixed atmosphere of fear and hope that is instead the greatest strength of the hour and a half of viewing. Why Girls Lost, even without sensational interpretations on the part of her actresses, she delves with good sensitivity into the personal drama experienced by those who find themselves facing and accepting their sexual identity, and coming to terms with themselves is the only solution to find inner peace.
The form of dependence of which Kim is a victim and which pushes her, against all logic and by putting an apparently unshakable friendship into play, to become a man in order to be approved by the world is rightly charged in a negative perspective, since it lacks the necessary awareness and maturity. at such a great pace.
And in expressing the emotionality with the right dramatic efficacy the film finds its tangible strength, heart and soul of the whole operation.