‘The Girls Are Alright’ Review: A Gentle Study of Female Friendship That Blows in on a Warm Summer Breeze
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. Merging drama with what occasionally feels like candidly observational documentary technique (how artificially so, the audience cannot say), “The Girls Are All Right” further blurs matters by naming all her characters (including her own, the onscreen scribe and director) for the actors playing them.
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The duly playful, freeform result occasionally skirts preciousness but is mostly rather affecting, bound by a palpable sense of female friendship and a perceptive interest in the dynamics thereof. This delicate, summery diversion could gather warm word of mouth as it tours the festival circuit following its competition premiere in Karlovy Vary. The Czech fest has been good to Arana and her producer Jonás Trueba, having also unveiled their two previous collaborations, both directed by the latter: last year’s comparably wry, self-reflexive miniature “You Have To Come and See It,” and 2019’s searching, sun-kissed character study “The August Virgin.”
Notwithstanding a change in helmer, the three films form an elegantly compatible trilogy in the approximate spirit of Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, except the season connecting them is unchanging: the hazy, balmy days of the Spanish summer, where bleachy sunshine and dry wind heighten sensual yearnings and slow conversations to a circling, meandering pace. The five women of “The Girls Are Alright” have headed out to the country on a kind of working retreat. Over the course of a week, they workshop and rehearse a new historical play written by Itsaso (Arana), though in what mostly amounts to a vacation from men and family, they all have other things to discuss.
Actors Barbara (Barbara Lennie) and Irene (Irene Escolar) are longtime friends who have been through thick and thin together: Barbara is expecting her first child, and Irene has already been appointed godmother. Their younger co-stars Helena (Helena Ezquerro) and Itziar (Itziar Manero) are consumed with more youthful worries and relationship crises: Itziar spends much time parsing and returning the voice notes left her by a crush in the city, while Helena freely peruses the menfolk of the nearby village. Rehearsal sessions bleed into their personal chatter, as they all wonder what they’re bringing to Itsaso’s play that another actor couldn’t: “How do you play infatuation if you haven’t experienced it?” one frets.
The content of the play itself, revolving around four aristocratic sisters and perceived mental illness, is close to incidental. Though Arana milks some gentle comedy from their acting exercises, the play here feels like the factor shaping the principals’ interactions rather than the other way round, as a sustained period of sisterly bonding helps these women to see their own lives in relief. The arcs here are mellow, everyday rather than seismic, but significant nonetheless: Some gain confidence in their craft, others in their personal agency, while Barbara talks down her doubts about her impending motherhood.
The wonderful Lennie (“Sunday’s Illness,” “Everybody Knows”) has the most complex emotional transitions to play here, but this is a generously shared ensemble piece, its shifting moods and hues dictated by group interaction, from giddily hammered revelry to confessional intimacy. With a predominantly female crew, moreover, the film has the aura of a mutually invested, understanding collaboration matching the feminine alliance on screen. Sara Gallego’s lovely, woozy lensing is attuned to varying tones and textures of skin and hair, and how the sunlight hits each woman differently, while Marta Velasco’s editing is sympathetic to the organic, interconnected rhythms of their chatter, as attentive to those listening as those talking.
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