‘The Girls Are Alright’ Review: A Gentle Study of Female Friendship That Blows In On a Warm Summer Breeze
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic The loose, lolling chapters of “The Girls Are Alright” are marked and separated by a simple visual motif: for each one, a different close-up panel of ornately illustrated Toile de Jouy fabric, rendered in various pastel shades against a calico background.
The material’s distinctive period pastoral scenes, depicting gussied-up women in various states of passive repose and their corresponding noblemen, contrast pleasingly with the more modern, less dependent portrait of 21st-century femininity presented in Spanish writer-director-star Itsaso Arana’s short, sweet, winsome freshman feature.
When its female characters don Toile-appropriate corsets and hoop skirts, it’s with a postmodern, literally performative sense of irony.
For the five women descending on a sleepy, tucked-away villa at the outset of Arana’s film are all in the theater — four of them actors, one a playwright — with the reflective, hyper-examined ways of being that come with that environment, where even real life is played and analyzed to some extent.
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