The warm summer sun glistening on the beach. The sound
of waves crashing against the sand. A picnic on a hillside. These are all the
wonderful staples of summer you don’t get to experience living in a Texas
suburb. Then again, you don’t really get to have them if you live near the
Texas coast either. Have you ever been to Galveston, Texas? The beaches there
are not great, Bob. Maybe I can’t have my idyllic beach time excursion in
reality. But movies like An Easy Girl can help compensate for that
absence. I can live vicariously through fictious characters having the kind of
warm and bubbly summer exceeding my grasp in Allen, TX.
An Easy Girl protagonist Naima (Mina Fahrid) is also
feeling like she’s missing out on something in her life. She lives a studious
rule-abiding life. It’s not a bad existence but she can’t help but feel like
she’s missing something. When Naima’s cousin, Sofia (Zahia Dehar), arrives into
town, she begins to get a taste of the life that’s so long eluded her. Sofia is
the total opposite of Naima, with her regular sexual encounters, tattoos and
party-all-night attitude. She’s basically Naima’s hero. Sofia loves this free-wheeling
lifestyle but is it the right fit for Naima? And are the friends Sofia makes in
her shenanigans the kind of friends you can really depend on?
Director Rebecca Zlotowski frames the luxurious
landscapes Sofia and Naima transverse throughout An Easy Girl with the
kind of picture-perfect quality you’d expect out of a postcard. The softness of
the frame, the heavy presence of natural light, you just wanna hop into the
frame and enjoy all the upscale antics they’re getting into. Of course, this is
juxtaposed against the fact that reality intrudes upon many of their outings. A
pair of dudes shout “Whores!” to Sofia and Naima after they rebuke their
romantic advances at the beach. A classy dinner is home to a hostess who pokes
and prods at Sofia, particularly in regards to her decision to undergo plastic
surgery.
Though this world is something that Naima is enamored
with, it’s also one that’s far less perfect than it would appear. By the end of
An Easy Girl, even the easygoing Sofia has been revealed to be a false
idol of sorts. Naima always saw Sofia as someone whose above normal human
beings, as seen by Naima imagining Sofia in a mid-movie montage of shots depicting
Sofia lounging on the beach make her look like a model in a beer commercial. Sofia
is not like you and me. She’s something else. She takes control of her life.
She’s the kind of person Naima would give anything to be.
But Sofia’s climatic insistence on just moving on from
false accusations of thievery, despite Naima wanting to clear their names, annihilates
Naima’s illusions of her cousin. Sofia’s sense of control only goes so far. She’d
rather just plow ahead in life rather than challenge authority figures. To challenge
them would inspire changes in Sofia’s life that she cannot comprehend. Better
to muddle through the status quo instead. Sofia is not the larger-than-life
figure in Naima’s head. She’s a person. An Easy Girl, then, is a
cinematic reflection of the universal coming-of-age experience of realizing
your heroes are people to.
The thoughtful exploration of this theme proves to be
the most intriguing part of An Easy Girl. The rest of the movie is on
the order of fine but not exactly exceptional. Little in this movie registers
as bad, in fact, it’s quite well-made. But the slow pacing and muted
performances ensure that An Easy Girl too often feels interchangeable
with other coming-of-age dramas. A little more personality injected into Zlotowski
and Teddy Lussi-Modeste’s screenplay could have taken An Easy Girl from decent
to something truly special. At least it delivers a large number of glorious
beaches for me to imagine myself romping through.
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