B-Happy Movie Review:


Wh at strange directions this movie takes. It starts off looking like a coming-of-age tale of a teenage girl (as advertised), and ends up in a land
somewhere between Brett Easton Ellis and “Requiem for a Dream,” where life becomes tragic and tortuous. Not many movies are able to start off one way and end so differently. This one does, and it almost works, but I just couldn’t believe the way the main character was acting.

This Spanish film, from director Gonzalo Justiniano, opens with an image that made me very happy: The main character, the teenage Kathy, rescues a
rabbit that is caught in a snare, and sets it free. After seeing a guinea pig, fish, squid, a bird, a goat and some dogs being killed in films over the last week and a half, I was overjoyed to see one being spared.

Kathy announces, in the film’s opening voiceover, that she is not afraid of anything. This is just as well, considering all of the awful things that
happen to her over the course of the film. We see her with her brother, Chemo, living with their mother. Kathy and her mum go to the city, where
they visit her dad, who is in prison, soon to be released. When he is released, he comes home, and lives with them for a while. Soon, however, he
is robbing shops again, and ends up on the run. Then her mother takes ill. And then everything that could possibly go wrong does. If it were me, I'd
be pretty afraid.

What is odd about the film is the way it treats its material. It has a certain indifference to all of this tragedy, and so does Kathy. At first I found her character likeable, but by the end I just couldn’t understand her. There is a bit where she ends up in a young offender’s institute. She says she is annoyed about this, as she has done nothing wrong, but she doesn’t really act it. This situation might be described as a Kafkaesque nightmare, except for the fact that in Kafka, the protagonists are depressed and tortured by the situations they find themselves in; Kathy just goes with the flow, and so does the film.

My feelings about the film are kind of split. That the film never becomes melodramatic is to its credit, but its total lack of emotion is just weird. In the scene where she loses her virginity to a classmate, she just brings him home and tells him to undress. She isn’t nervous? In that scene, we understand the guy she is having sex with much more than we understand her.

At the end, when Kathy’s life has unravelled and nothing is as it was, why has she not changed at all? The film moves along as if it is making an
important and touching point about life, but Kathy is so indifferent and impossible to understand that I didn’t feel like the movie taught me anything. It certainly did not move me; I have to be involved with the characters for that to happen. Perhaps my emotions were stirred via some of the other characters’ actions. But most of the time I was just thinking about Kathy, and wondering if any teenager has ever been as detached and
indifferent as her. In my experience with teenagers (and as one), I find they only act detached and carefree, but are in fact unpredictable, confused
and very often busy thinking about ways to make themselves happy. And they are afraid, of a lot of things.

** (out of 5)

Adam Whyte

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