second coming-of-age
10 titles
Films about young people who have no idea what to do with their lives. Some stall, some go along with what other people expect, and some walk out.
The first group stalls. In The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock comes home to California after college, gets a hero's welcome from his parents, is not quite sure what to do with the rest of his life, and is seduced by Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's partner. In Kicking and Screaming, Grover's girlfriend Jane tells him she is moving to Prague. He stays behind with friends who cannot work up the energy to leave their university, and none of them wants to end up like Chet, who is in his tenth year there. Julie in The Worst Person in the World spends four years in Oslo working through her love life and struggling to find a career.
The second group is managing other people's expectations. Danielle in Shiva Baby is a college student who runs into her sugar daddy at a shiva and has to cover her tracks with her parents, her ex-girlfriend and the family friends in the room. In Dry Season, the radio announces in 2006 that the government of Chad has amnestied its war criminals, and Gumar Abatcha, outraged, orders his sixteen-year-old grandson Atim to find the man who killed Atim's father and execute him. In A Bride for Rip Van Winkle, Nanami, an apathetic part-time teacher, is engaged almost at once to Tetsuya, who messaged her on a social network. When he asks for a longer guest list, her online friend Amuro hires actors to play her wedding guests.
The third group has walked out and falls in with whoever turns up. In Rebels of the Neon God, Hsiao Kang defies his parents, drops out of cram school and heads for downtown Taipei, where he falls in with a hood named Ah Tze. In Vagabond, a young woman travels the south of France in winter, and many of the men and women she meets project their needs onto her or try to give her life direction. In The Mother and the Whore, Alexandre is an unemployed young man in Paris, living with Marie and trying to talk his former love Gilberte into marrying him, when he meets a nurse named Veronika. In Burning, the deliveryman Jong-su looks after a cat for Hae-mi, a girl who once lived in his neighbourhood, and when she returns from Africa she introduces him to a young man named Ben.
You watch them stall, go along or walk out, and wait to see what each one wanted.
