Lithuanian first-time director Saule Bliuvaite makes a real impression with this impressively acted and elegantly composed feature set in the tough suburbs of Kaunas where teen girls dream of escape through an international modelling career. Bliuvaite and her cinematographer Vytautas Katkus contrive striking tableaux and ambient setpieces, creating an emotional context for this drama: a world of alienation and desperate need, but also resilient humour. It’s a disturbing essay in sexuality, poverty and sexual capital which reminded me a little of Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure and Isabella Eklöf’s Holiday in its candid, affectless evocation of the young female body, and its vulnerability to weight-loss exploitation. Bliuvaite’s style reminded me of the Austrians Ulrich Seidl and Jessica Hausner – the latter was incidentally president of the jury which gave this film top prize at last year’s Locarno film festival.
Newcomer Vesta Matulyte plays Marija, a shy girl who walks with a slight limp due to a disability; she has to live with her grandma while her mum fixes her relationship problems. After being bullied at her new school, she stands up to and finally befriends a girl who had tried to steal her jeans in the swimming pool changing room. This is Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaite), and together these two respond to an ad for a “modelling school” audition which promises to send winning applicants on fashion trips to the far east and the US. However they must pay upfront for their photoshoots and other unspecified admin costs, and their parents must sign a contract permitting their daughters to work for nothing until the “debt” is paid off. It is clearly abusive and exploitative on some level, with the penniless girls having to resort secretly to obvious measures to pay these initial fees; yet it may not be any more of a scam than the rest of the supposedly legitimate “modelling recruitment” business.
There are bleak, mordant touches in the reportage camerawork; we are often placed in longshot in relation to the action, or sometimes directly overhead, so that we can savour this blank context. Marija wears a Marilyn Manson T-shirt (the director leaves it up to us to ponder that celebrity’s current associations) and Kristina’s amiable dad Sarunas (Giedrius Savickas) – who is poignantly prepared to help his daughter get out of this gloomy place by any means necessary – wears a “Queen Elizabeth II Rest In Peace” T-shirt: a very surreal touch. The truth is Marija and Kristina are hardly more than children, and to witness Kristina get a tongue piercing or swallow a tapeworm parasite for weight loss (cheaper than Ozempic) is to witness some terrible harm or self-harm.
Periodically, Bliuvaite will show us the young women practising the catwalk slouch around the grim scrubland, sashaying 10 or 20 paces forward, halting with a hip-jut, swivelling and sashaying back – a stylised choreography of coercion and unhappiness. It’s a very stylish piece of work.
