Little Vera (1/24/19)

     When I came to class today I was in sort of a bad mood and I had a pretty annoying headache. When I left I was in an even worse mood and my headache had gone from annoying to splitting, but I really wasn't too upset about it. Little Vera was just so depressing and at times a little loud and grating but I really enjoyed it. It reminded me of Alex Cox films like Sid and Nancy and Repo Man with the sort of grungy under-side of life being shown with the bizarre misfit characters and an overall punk attitude. This film felt very punk, not only was the main character a sort of anti-establishment, mean girl but also the attitude of the film at times was sort of anarchic. From the times when Vera screams in our ears for extended periods of time to its sort of disregard for any type of catharsis, even to its use of objectively unattractive scenery. This film was very interesting but just so hard to watch. It reminds me as well as a lot of plays I have seen where we just see one character get so beaten down (both literally and metaphorically) that they attempt suicide.

     The abuse from her father was just rough to watch and so realistic, the apathy of her mother and the idea that her father couldn't go to prison because they needed him live comfortably is a very realistic but tragic family dynamic. No one truly wants the dad around but yet they need him to keep living and I think to a point that the father knows this, this is perhaps why he is so driven to drink. While everyone harps on Vera, her dad especially, they have their own problems too. It is shown pretty bluntly when her dad smokes next to her and she repeats the same things they have been telling her the whole film. They sort of project their unhappiness and their problems onto Vera. Vera reacts to this by getting in with the wrong crowd, getting in with the crowd hat gets D.I.Y tattoos on their chest at a dirty beach. I liked how throughout the movie that blaming Vera was never an option for the parents they always blamed the boyfriend or her friends when they were yelling at her. The funny thing is that towards the end of the film she really is being influenced by her friend when she lets out the "ha"s that her friend taught her. The other sort of ironic thing I like is when her father keeps saying what will the neighbors think in regards to her but he is the one being loud, drunk, and unruly.

     Going along with the punk attitude of the film i mentioned earlier I did like the subversion of expectations that happens with Vera's love life. I like how at first she dates the bad boy and things don't go as planned and no one really thinks they'll be together and so on. Then there is that once scene where the good boy comes back from the navy for just one day to see and her mom fully expects her to get with him, but we see that he is no better than any other character in the film he just seems sweet on the outside but he just wants the same thing as anyone else. That was one of the most intense moments in the film for me when she was hitting him in the hallway.

     While I struggle to find single, specific scenes that I really enjoyed in this film, I enjoyed it as a whole and I really liked the attitude of it overall. While a lot of the characters were full of hate they still showed weakness, and while a lot of times the characters were just yelling they had a lot of personality and heart when they needed it. I think it is very impressive that a film like this was able to come up soon after all the censors and rules were lifted or at least lightened. It seems to me that this a story of youth that the filmmaker and the public had brewing for a long while and really needed to release into the world.