Foxfire's full title had me a little giddy. I mean, who wouldn't want to see a movie called Foxfire: The Confessions of a Girl Gang? Well, unfortunately, the elongated title of Laurent Cantent's, the director of 2008's stirring drama The Class, is a washout. Overlong, poorly scripted, meandering structure and so-so acting bring the side down.
Adapted from Joyce Carol Oates' novel, Foxfire is set in upstate New York in the 1950s. The outspoken teenager Legs (Adamson) heads up the titular gang of proto-feminists who, sick of being bullied, raped and generally mistreated by a string of boys and men, take revenge. Graffiti leads to beatings of would-be paedophiles and rapists, before the girls reject society altogether by renting a rundown house in the country and filling it first with more disaffected girls and then with runaway wives.
Published in 1993, Oates novel, which was already adapted in the little-seen Angelina-Jolie-before-she-was-famous 1996 flick of the same name. Cantent's Foxfire is a more faithful representation and presents a 50s that contrasts with the jukebox burger joints, drive-ins and greasers we're usually fed in movies of the era. The ordinariness of their drab world might not be visually exciting but Cantent creates a very lived-in world. This is all welcome. What's not welcome is everything else.
While the acting on show is amateurish at times, the cast are given some lines that are just undeliverable. Raven Adamson, as the gang's defacto leader, is called upon (in what feels like every scene) to deliver another rabble-rousing speech; a newcomer, Adamson hasn't the on-screen magnetism to inspire but she's given some horrendously plodding stuff to voice. The repetition doesn't help - bad man does bad thing and is humiliated happens again and again without escalation. These are the movie's big scenes and when they stink, there's no coming back from them.
Does taking a pro-woman stance have to include an anti-men one too? Men here, apart from the soft-hearted old socialist, are of the despicable kind. Legs does raise the notion that it's not just men, but women too (all under the umbrella of capitalism), that are the ruin of the world but that's soon forgotten about.
Poor.
