Sally Potter’s GINGER & ROSA is perhaps her most accessible and personal film to date. Eschewing an all out depiction of mounting nuclear armament and the devastations it causes, Potter offers an introspective and emotionally charged adolescent drama.

Set in the sixties, the film follows Ginger (Elle Fanning, adopting an impressive British accent) and Rosa (the alluring newcomer Alice Englert), best friends since their birth on the day of the H-Bomb launch on Hiroshima. The soul mates spend their days in bathwater- shrunk jeans, listening to Sydney Bechet and hitchhiking around London; theorising life and pondering their joint future as intellectual voyagers in a world full of culture, poetry and jazz.

As the threat of nuclear war looms, the two start re-examining their teenage existentialism and begin to channel their energy into increasingly dissimilar directions. Becoming all too aware of her eye-catching good looks, Rosa goes about exploring her sexual dexterity by catching the eye of Ginger’s left-leaning bohemian father, Roland (Alessandro Nivola). Roland is growing apart from Ginger’s mother Natalie, played by MAD MEN star Christina Hendricks. The mature and poetic Ginger, on the other hand, becomes progressively weary and anxious about nuclear attack, and looks to a ragtag group of family friends (played by Timothy Spall, Annette Bening and Oliver Platt) to augment her worries, which drive her to campaign against a possibly approaching cold war.

Potter’s seventh feature is a loaded time bomb of angst and confusion…

Often as precocious, gloomy and navel gazing as its prudent protagonists, Potter’s seventh feature is a loaded time bomb of angst and confusion. The destructive nature of warfare and annihilation plays out as a jazzily assembled and fluidly morose meditation on burgeoning maturity. Potter juggles her actors with languid aplomb, eking out sturdy performances from a talented cast. Robbie Ryan’s candelabra-tinted cinematography, along with a fine soundtrack, complete a perfectly and restrained snapshot of sixties’ London and all its amiable kitchen sink foibles.

Using the unease of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a metaphor for the frantic disillusionment these girls face, GINGER & ROSA’s  89-minute runtime provides less of an opportunity for Potter’s screenplay to fully etch the frenzied magnitude of her character’s troubles and mould them into an entirely satisfying whole. However, this is an emotionally involving tale that meets a grandiose unease with reflective disquiet, to handsome effect.

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