ABOUT: Louise, an aimless, 28 year-old Brooklynite, recently single, sort of a musician, depressed without admitting to it, drunkenly falls while doing something stupid and breaks her hip. This lands her in a physical therapy ward full of people twice her age. There, she meets Antonina – a cranky elderly Polish woman, who speaks no English. Louise gets a job caring for her. Neither woman loves the arrangement but it’s time to face the truth about aging. We all have to grow up sometime.
JASON’S REACTION: A solid American Indie that is actually about getting older and the realistic ways of actually growing up and what that entails, LATE BLOOMERS has a pretty unique presence of a younger woman (Karen Gillan) meeting a much older Polish woman in a hospital and the unlikely relationship that comes out of it. Perhaps people will want to see this one because it stars someone that has acted in a Marvel movie? Karen Gillian’s character is very complicated with both a relationship with the older Polish woman she meets in a hospital along with her own mother who has fallen to mental illness, and all of this is handled with a surprising amount of reality.
Filmmaker Lisa Steen also shoots a lot of this for real with a lovely, almost film-like appearance and also has a gift for making all of her characters big and small have three dimensions. A late music sequence featuring Gillan is one of the most powerful things I have seen at the festival this year and thankfully it leaves a lot of things with open intentions and not everything wrapped up in a bow, which a larger studio movie would have done. Gillian is also at her best here with just the right level of sadness and hope for the future, all the while freely admitting her frustrations still make us care about her at a core level. This movie doesn’t currently have a distributor but I do see a small label picking it up, and I hope more audiences also find it as it’s quite a moving story and especially one that respects the older generation.
This film and many others like it will be showing at South By Southwest taking place March 10-19. For more information point your browser to www.sxsw.com!