‘Late Bloomers’ Review: Karen Gillan Stars In Messy Coming-Of-Age Story – SXSW
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While Andrea Riseborough’s shock Oscar nomination for the SXSW 2022 sleeper To Leslie is still being processed, it’s too early to see whether it will have any effect on anything other than awards-season process. It would be nice, however, to think that it could also make it just that little bit harder for the success of smaller, more personal movies to be measured by box office returns alone (how many news stories made a point of deriding To Leslie’s $32,000 take?). Late Bloomers doesn’t have that film’s dramatic intensity, and is way more schematic in its plotting, but Lisa Steen’s debut feature is still an intimate, defiantly female-fronted indie, showcasing an engaging and refreshingly vanity-free performance from Karen Gillan, a talented Scottish actress whose career to date is still something of a work in progress.
Gillan plays Louise, a woman in her late 20s whose life is thrown into turmoil by a bad breakup. We meet her, alone and drunk, at a party at her ex’s old place, where she cynically projects her obvious fear of loneliness onto others, complaining that “adults are saaad.” Not as sad as Louise, however, whose friend has a showdown with her in the bathroom, calling her a “selfish brat” and telling her to “grow the f*ck up.” Louise is unperturbed and waves him off. “Take your white wine spritzer and fly away like all the rest,” she says waspishly, relishing a pretty good riposte while still sat on the toilet.
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Rounding off a bad night, Louise is the last to leave, but not before she has learned he ex’s new address. Ringing the doorbell gets no answer, and attempting to climb in through the front window in party heels inevitably leads to disaster. After falling a floor’s height to the pavement, she finds herself in a hospital ward with a seriously broken hip, in the next bed to a cantankerous old lady who speaks no English.
Louise has the old lady kicked out, but continues to see her, notably in the gym, where she learns her name: Antonina (Margaret Sophie Stein), aka the bad girl of physical therapy. They are finally thrown together when, after waiting ages for a bus that doesn’t seem to be coming, Louise invites her to share a cab. But when they get to Antonina’s home, she wanders off to a nearby pharmacy and causes a scene. Louise has no choice but to take her home, a Craigslist rental that she shares with the owner, Brick (Jermaine Fowler), a Brooklyn hipster living on the proceeds of his father’s one pop hit.
The next day Louise takes Antonina back to her home where she meets the old woman’s daughter. She learns that Antonina is Polish, and that her grievance with the pharmacist is very real and not a sign of dementia. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with her at all (“It is Polish to live forever”). But seeing as the odd couple seem to be getting along OK, however fractiously, it comes as no surprise when Louise is offered a job as Antonina’s full-time caregiver and, given her current circumstances, accepts it.
From here, the plot seems to write itself, which is shame, because there’s a lot of chemistry between the two leads (a scene in which Louise persuades Antonina to wear incontinence pants is a very good and very visual example). But Antonina, a tough and wicked presence, falls victim to the script’s insistence that this be the younger woman’s story, so we have the inevitable moment of reckoning in which, during a drunken relapse, Louise falls down on the job, losing the old woman’s trust and friendship.
It’s an old story, well told, and follows much of the blueprint laid out by the 2011 French hit Intouchables (opposites meet in the middle). Sadly, it loses much of its energy whenever Stein disappears to make more room for Louise’s millennial woes. Growing up may be the subject of the film, but, ironically, it just leaves us wanting more of the woman who effortlessly styles out the art of growing old disgracefully.
Title: Late Bloomers
Festival: SXSW, Narrative Feature Competition
Director: Lisa Steen
Screenwriter: Anna Greenfield
Cast: Karen Gillan, Margaret Sophie Stein, Jermaine Fowler
Running time: 1 hr 29 min
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