Director: Emmanuel Finkiel, Gregg Araki
Cast: Shailene Woodley, Shiloh Fernandez, Eva Green, Christopher Meloni, Thomas Jane, Angela Bassett, Gabourey Sidibe
Companies: Why Not Productions
Rating: R for drug abuse, language throughout, some violence and sexual content.
Runtime: 1 hour, 31 minutes
Plot
Kat Connors (Shailene Woodley) is 17 years old when her perfect homemaker mother, Eve (Eva Green), a beautiful, enigmatic, and haunted woman, disappears - just as Kat is discovering and relishing her newfound sexuality. Having lived for so long in a stifled, emotionally repressed household, she barely registers her mother's absence and certainly doesn't blame her doormat of a father, Brock, (Christopher Meloni) for the loss. In fact, it's almost a relief. But as time passes, Kat begins to come to grips with how deeply Eve's disappearance has affected her. Returning home on a break from college, she finds herself confronted with the truth about her mother's departure, and her own denial about the events surrounding it...
Kat Connors (do Shailene Woodley đóng) được 17 tuổi khi người mẹ nội trợ hoàn hảo của cô, Eve (do Eva Green đóng) - một người phụ nữ xinh đẹp, bí ẩn và bị ma ám - biến mất. Đó cũng chính là lúc cô bắt đầu khám phá và tận hưởng đời sống tình dục vừa khai mở của mình. Vốn sống quá lâu trong một gia đình nghẹt thở, xúc cảm bị đè nén, cô không khai báo sự vắng mặt của mẹ mình, và dĩ nhiên là không trách cứ gì người cha nhu nhược Brock (do diễn viên Christopher Meloni đóng) về sự mất mát đó. Thực ra, đó còn hầu như là một điều làm cô cảm thấy nhẹ nhõm. Nhưng khi thời gian trôi qua, Kat bắt đầu nhận ra sự biến mất của Eve đã tác động đến cô sâu sắc như thế nào. Trở về nhà từ một kỳ nghỉ ở trường đại học, cô phải đối mặt với sự thật về sự mất tích của mẹ mình, và sự chối bỏ của mình về các sự kiện bao quanh nó....
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Sundance Review: Gregg Araki’s 'White Bird In A Blizzard' Starring Shailene Woodley, Eva Green & More
By Chase Whale | The PlaylistJanuary 25, 2014 at 3:24PM
By now, devoted cinephiles likely know what to expect going into a Gregg Araki movie: sex-crazed teens, an overabundance of nudity (sometimes pretty, sometimes not), a dream-like story wrapped snugly in a nightmare and a killer soundtrack. However, it would be lazy for someone to call it trash cinema—there’s a lot of feeling in his films (please watch "Mysterious Skin"now). Araki is a brilliant director who finds a great deal of meaning in stories of teenage angst and sexual desire, and is perhaps the finest example of coming-of-rage cinema. His latest film, "White Bird in a Blizzard," is his most grownup film to date, but never deviates far from his comfort zone.
Set in the late ‘80s, "White Bird in a Blizzard" revolves around Kat Connor (Shailene Woodley) and her incredibly dysfunctional family who are living crappily ever after. Her dad Brock (Christopher Meloni) is a pushover, and her mom Eve (Eva Green) is an alcoholic who hates her family, her life, and just wants to live like she’s 17 again—well on the depressing side of immaturity. Things get weird when Eve disappears without a trace, sending the family into a downward spiral of lies, hatred and promiscuous sex.
Because it must be said—Eva Green isn’t exactly the star of 'White Bird,' but she gives one hell of a performance. With the small running time she’s in, she doesn’t just chew up the scenery, she devours it whole (including every actor that shares space with her). Her vicious maw is as staggering as her talent threatens to overshadow everyone who dares to come across her path. But the film’s standout performance may in fact be Woodley's, which may confuse her younger fans, but please Hollywood. If her work in the film doesn’t scream “I’m an adult, hear me roar!” then nothing does. Her character has the filthiest mouth of the bunch, spends a great deal of the film nude and, at one point, has plenty of dirty sex with her boyfriend (hilariously played byShiloh Fernandez, who needs more roles like this) and blissfully describes co-star Thomas Jane's lower anatomy to her teen pals (Gabourey Sidibeand Mark Indelicato). You will never look at Woodley the same way again, she’s all grown up and not a little 'Descendant' anymore, folks.
If you’re keeping score, mentioned in the first paragraph is Araki’s always-excellent use and carefully curated selection of pop music and this trend continues. Since “White Bird” is set in the late ‘80s, Joy Division, The Cure, and all of your favorite synth-pop bands are prominently featured, their instantly recognizable sounds oozing throughout the film. One massive thing to appreciate about Araki’s films is how the music he chooses works perfectly in sync with his imagery, providing a heady and intoxicating viewing experience.
‘White Bird’ is based on the book of the same name by Laura Kasischke, adapted by Araki. The film follows the same story as the novel (albeit with a divergent ending), but what’s so fantastic about ‘White Bird’ is the obvious homage to David Lynch’s "Twin Peaks" throughout. The entire mood of the film doesn’t feel quite real—like it’s one long, ominous dream, with no obvious sign that the audience will wake up anytime soon. To top it all off, the mysterious doyenne of "Twin Peaks," Laura Palmer herself (Sheryl Lee) has a small role in the film, which has to be Araki winking at the audience. All in all, “White Bird in a Blizzard” is worth seeing for Eva Green’s performance alone, and to experience the dreamlike quality of Gregg Araki’s individual, highly unique vision of cinema.
Trouble in the ’burbs in ‘White Bird in a Blizzard’
MAGNOLIA PICTURES
Shailene Woodley (with Shiloh Fernandez) is the rebellious daughter of a missing woman in “White Bird in a Blizzard.”
By Ty Burr GLOBE STAFF OCTOBER 30, 2014
‘White Bird in a Blizzard” develops engine trouble early on, right around the time it asks us to accept Eva Green as a desperate suburban housewife. The Paris-born actress (“Casino Royale,” “Dark Shadows”) is beautiful in that willowy French way, but she has shoulders that seem to stoop under the weight of depravity and eyes that could challenge Death himself to a chess match (Green would win, no contest). Offering her up as an oppressed all-American homemaker with a wimpy husband (Christopher Meloni) and a rebellious teenage daughter (Shailene Woodley) is like putting escargot on the menu at Applebee’s.
Green’s character, Eve Collins, goes missing in the first few scenes of Gregg Araki’s drama, and her absence nags at the daughter, Kat, like a toothache. Based on the novel by Laura Kasischke, “White Bird in a Blizzard” is told from the girl’s point of view as she explores her sexuality with the stoner kid next door (Shiloh Fernandez) and the ex-Marine police detective (Thomas Jane) tasked with solving the mother’s disappearance. Truth be told, it’s good to see Woodley (“The Fault in Our Stars,” “The Spectacular Now”) play something other than a sweetie-pie. Kat is not particularly nice and not terribly bright, but she knows what (and who) gets her pulse racing. It’s a neat portrait of a girl playing at being a tart before signing up for a life of bourgeois respectability.
After plowing a willful path of queer teen drama and self-conscious artificiality with 1995’s “The Doom Generation” and other early works, Araki has lost his way in recent years. “Mysterious Skin” (2004) was his best film, the 2007 stoner comedy “Smiley Face” his most conventional, and 2010’s “Kaboom” went straight to video on demand. “White Bird” seems like a halfhearted holding maneuver, a movie unsure of what it’s even about. The most interesting character, the mother, is the hole at the movie’s center, and in flashback sequences, Green gives a genuinely unsettling performance, with moments of madness, sanity, and outrageous sexuality. If Isabella Rossellini’s character in “Blue Velvet” had settled down and had kids, she might look something like this.
Oddly, “White Bird in a Blizzard” turns slowly into a mystery thriller, as Kat starts suspecting that her non-entity of a father may know more than he’s letting on. The intentional blandness of the writing keeps us from wanting to push further, though. Araki peppers the film with interesting faces — Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”) as Kat’s high school party pal, Dale Dickey as the stoner’s blind mother, Angela Bassett as a therapist, Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer herself!) as dad’s new girlfriend — but he gives them too little to do. Only Jane, as the cop who knows exactly what Mrs. Collins’s wayward daughter needs, has the sense of threat the movie is seeking. His and Woodley’s scenes together are dirty and alive.
They’re the only ones that feel that way. With “White Bird in a Blizzard,” Araki seems to be revisiting old haunts and trying to remember why they mattered to him. The film is set in the late 1980s and early 1990s if only to have this director’s beloved alt-rock from the period on the soundtrack: Cocteau Twins, New Order, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Cure. It’s a great mix tape, but it can’t take him home again.
Shailene Woodley yêu đương cuồng nhiệt trong phim mới
Trong trailer phim "White Bird in a Blizzard", nữ diễn viên 23 tuổi có không ít cảnh yêu đương, ôm hôn cháy bỏng với đồng nghiệp Shiloh Fernandez.Đoạn video dài gần 50 giây mở đầu bằng cảnh Shailene Woodley và đồng nghiệp 29 tuổi nhảy nhót trong một câu lạc bộ. Tiếp đó là những cảnh ôm hôn của hai người giữa các bối cảnh rạp chiếu phim, bể bơi, bãi đỗ xe thậm chí giữa trường học. Không chỉ hôn nhau, cả hai còn thực hiện những cảnh quay nhạy cảm trên ghế và nóc xe hơi.
Những hình ảnh nóng bỏng của Shailene Woodley trong phim.
White Bird in a Blizzard lấy bối cảnh năm 1998, kể về cuộc sống của cô bé 17 tuổi Kat Connors. Nhân vật chính do Shailene đóng rất thân thiết với mẹ - bà Eva (diễn viên Eva Green đảm nhận). Hai mẹ con Kat có thể trò chuyện với nhau về mọi thứ trên đời, dường như không có bí mật nào giữa họ.
Cả hai dành những tháng ngày tuyệt vời bên nhau. Đến một ngày, Kat chờ đợi một cuộc gọi từ mẹ nhưng cuộc gọi đó không bao giờ tới. Mẹ cô đột nhiên biến mất. Trên hành trình đi tìm kiếm những gì xảy ra với mẹ, Kat học được những điều làm thay đổi cuộc sống của cô vĩnh viễn, trong đó có mối quan hệ cuồng nhiệt với nhân vật do Shiloh Fernandez đóng.
White Bird in a Blizzard đã công chiếu tại Liên hoan phim Sundance hồi tháng một và sẽ ra rạp vào 24/10. Phim do Gregg Araki đạo diễn và viết kịch bản.
Song Ngư
SHAILENE WOODLEY
SHILOH FERNANDEZ
'White Bird in a Blizzard’ review: Nice girl, crazy mom
“White Bird in a Blizzard” is an odd little concoction, a coming-of-age story that, only in passing, is also a mystery. Shailene Woodley splits the difference between her angelic essence in “The Fault in Our Stars” and her sour personality in “The Descendants” to play Kat, an intelligent girl with raging hormones and a coarse mouth, who also has a sweetness about her.
She’s just trying to get by, despite having a mother so mercurial and crazy that Eva Green is playing her. Green is 34 playing 43, but she suggests the extra years with a voice half-trashed by bitterness. Honestly, it’s hard to say whether Green is terrible or brilliant in “White Blizzard,” but she is certainly something to see — standing at the top of the stairs like a white apparition, framed in doorways like some monster, yelling and flailing about how much she hates her life, and snarling at her husband with homicidal rage when he asks her to pass the butter.
There’s a point beyond bad and good. There’s a kind of performance that’s just a huge fact, that you can choose to embrace or not. Embrace this one.
Green, as well as Woodley’s sincerity and freshness, and a story with a few more curves and slopes than you might expect, keeps “White Bird in a Blizzard” watchable throughout. But the film’s atmosphere drags it down. Araki evokes the 1980s — most of the movie takes place in 1988 — with a synthesized hum underscoring most scenes. I lived through that entire decade and never heard that hum. Maybe it was everywhere, and so we all got used to it.
Even worse, for a film supposedly about young people, the conversations between high school kids are unconvincing, just random complaining about parents or talking about sex. Just about every time Kat talks to a friend, you get a flat wide shot, with bad dialogue and a couple of arbitrary close-ups thrown in.
Still, if you want to see a raving Eva Green, as Mom, waking up her daughter in the middle of the night to ask if her boyfriend is a good, uh, lover — that’s not exactly the word she uses — “White Bird in a Blizzard” is the movie for you.
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. E-mail: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: MickLaSalle
Review: 'White Bird in a Blizzard' forgettable mystery
By Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: twitter.com/goodyk.
Shailene Woodley plays a girl whose sexuality is blooming when her mother disappears. Woodley is good, but director Gregg Araki struggles with the tone of the movie throughout.
Shailene Woodley is a magnetic actress, the type of performer who not only demands your attention but rewards it.
She's smart and believable, straddling the difficult line between teenage doubt and preternatural confidence in films like "The Descendants" and "The Spectacular Now."
Good thing. Because without her, "White Bird in a Blizzard" would be a laugh riot of the unintentional kind. With her, it's a modestly interesting coming-of-age movie, and a totally forgettable mystery. Granted, director Gregg Araki ("The Doom Generation," "Mysterious Skin"), who based his script on the Laura Kasischke novel, seems to be going for a Douglas Sirk, '50s-vibe kind of thing (though the film is set in 1988, and comes out, you know, now). But he completely misjudges the tonal shifts. For all the inviting, kitschy visuals (horrible curtains, etc.), there is a line, an action, even a performance that is so off-base it makes the movie play like a joke.
It's not.
Woodley plays Kat Connor, a high-school girl who has shed all remaining traces of recent baby fat and blossomed into a young woman. This drives her mother Eve (Eva Green, woefully miscast) crazy. She's already unhappy in her boring marriage to Brock (Christopher Meloni), a drip of a fellow whose drooping mustache matches his personality. But once Kat starts to attract attention, particularly the notice of Phil (Shiloh Fernandez), the dim-bulb hunk who lives across the street, it's too much. She starts slinking around in inappropriate clothes whenever Phil is around, even as he and Kat start to experiment with sex.
We learn all this from Kat's sessions with a therapist (Angela Bassett), who she starts seeing after her mother one day simply disappears. Poof. Gone. No note, no clues, no nothing. Brock is despondent, and near-catatonic for a while.
Kat seems OK with it, except for the occasional weird dreams involving her mother (and, sometimes, snow). She continues her relationship with Phil, but also starts having sex with Detective Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane), who is supposed to be investigating her mother's disappearance but is a lot more interested in bedding Kat.
This delights her pals Beth (Gabourey Sidibe) and Mickey (Mark Indelicato), who bask vicariously in her exploits. The scenes in which they dish and laugh and gossip are among the film's best.
Araki skips ahead a couple of years, with Kat now a student at University of California-Berkeley. She comes home to find Brock dating, Phil working at a hardware store and Scieziesciez still ready and willing.
The mystery is solved in unsatisfying fashion — it's telegraphed from a long way off. But that aspect of the story plays like an afterthought from the start. What's more troublesome for the film is the difference in Kat, whom Woodley plays with a genuineness that's winning, and everyone else in the movie. Green in particular seems to be channeling the bride of Frankenstein for half her scenes. It's an awkward mix of styles, and it doesn't work.
Woodley does, however. If there's a reason to watch "White Bird in a Blizzard" — and there is – she's it. Too bad there aren't more.
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