Madeline's Madeline

I watched _Madeline's Madeline_, mainly because I liked Josephine Decker's later film _Shirley_. This one's trying to do a lot—race, mental health, coming of age, mother-daughter tensions, plus a whole meta-theatre layer—whilst bold, it often felt like it was trying too hard to be important. That said, Helena Howard is phenomenal. It's a breakout performance full of rawness and intensity; she holds the whole chaotic thing together. Miranda July felt oddly constrained by the direction, somewhat hemmed in a film that encourages improvisation and emotional looseness, which is her bread and butter but denied to her here. There's no shortage of ideas here, and it's definitely interesting. Still, it left me admiring the ambition rather than enjoying the ride.

I think part of my problem with this was that however experimental the whole concept, or concept within that concept, was meant to be - I just didn't care one way or the other about the eponymous lass (Helena Howard). It didn't start so well with "you are not a cat, you are inside a cat" - not an image I wished to conjure up on any level! Anyway, she is a wanna-be actress who is quite prepared to put in the graft to succeed, and that's no easy task when surrounded by a combination of attitudes and ambitions that are as likely hostile to her success as not. To be fair to Howard, there is something very natural about her performance - it's just a girl trying to make it whilst juggling the balls of her personal life and the camerawork is sympathetically disjointed to give the whole thing a sense of lively improvisation as her story (sort of) unfolds. It's not that is lacks a traditional structure, it's just that by determining at all costs not to conform it completely failed to offer us any positives as to what it did want to be - and quite who it was for. It's random, bizarre and sometimes quite characterful but ultimately forgets to give us any hooks onto which we could invest. I didn't care nor, I wondered, should I. It's worth a watch; it's quirky and off the wall - but I think maybe just a little too self indulgent.