Stockholm Film Festival

A BITTER-SWEET STORY ABOUT FIRST love, placed in Louisiana during the 50's. Danielle is a 14-year-old girl who is discovering her sexuality and is longing for the big passion. She idealizes her 17 -year-old sister Manreen and lusts for Elvis. The sisters share all their secrets and are best friends. But, when the 17-year-old Court Foster, the new neighbor moves in, everything changes. Danielle immediately falls in love with him, but understands what unhappy love is when he starts to have a relationship with Maureen. _
Comment:
MATURING YOUTH, THEIR FIRST SEXUAL experiences and the step into the adult word is dealt with in this film by Robert Mulligan, a veteran who's directed this story, apparently completely uninfluenced by the last years' American films about young people who figuratively lose their innocence.
When Mulligan tells the story about two teenage sisters' relationship and their mutual love - the boy next door - he chooses to do so within an old-fashioned romantic-sentimental form, where the idyllic, crushed by tragedy, remains idyllic in the end. The Man in the Moon is a demonstration of Hollywood's most reliable dramaturgical formula, where accidents make up shameless attempts to make us bleed while they clear the way for the inevitable happy ending.
That's how test after test, one worse than the other, take place. All, however, have in common that they point towards a richer togetherness in the 50's nuclear family on the country-side in Louisiana where the two girls grow up. And, when the boy next door is sliced to death by a plough the sisters' rivalry is replaced by a deepening sense of unity.
LEIF JOLEY

Medverkande

Reese Witherspoon, Sam Waterston

Producent

Mark Rydell, William S. Gilmore, Shari Rhodes

Manus

Jenny Wingfield

Foto

Freddie Francis

Musik

James Newton Howard

Talat språk

English

 

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