Lady Bird

Greta Gerwig just became the fifth woman ever to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. That's right, from 442 times a director has been nominated for an Academy Awards, only 1.1% of them have been a female filmmaker. This disproportion is huge and makes very clear the gender gap that exists in cinema still in 2018. In an interview, Gerwig said that the moment when Kathryn Bigelow won the Best Director, it was like an epiphany, as if she realized "this is a job available to you". Which highlights the importance of representation and the power that one great female director can have in many hopefuls.

But Gerwig's nomination is not only good because of the political impact it has; it's also a recognition of a great work bringing to life the history of every middle-class artistic girl; because, no matter how particular Lady Bird could be (with her bright red dyed hair and self-given name), it is also a pretty universal character. The construction of Christine (aka Lady Bird) feels like a big team-effort between Gerwig and actress Saoirse Ronan. They are able to create such a complex identity through exploring quirky details of her life, ending with a main character that is really memorable and unique.

But it's not a film that only revolves around the lead character, here everybody who inhabits her world is treated with such care and sense of importance, that we are able to understand the conflicts between their different motivations; they are not there just to antagonize Christine, but to show that all of them have such intricate lives and each one is going through a personal battle and quest, that at times aligns with others' and at times opposes them. There are not good or bad guys, just humans that have some of both sides.

Above all, it feels like a great way to discover female experience through their own voice, not as a romanticized or sexualized version of what male director and writers assume. It is specially good at establishing a mother- teenage daughter relationship, how no matter how much love they have for each other, they end up being the villain in the other's story. Every discovery that Christine makes, it feels as a sincere understanding of the world and not as a moral message from the author; the empathy comes after the heartbreak, and the maturity comes after screwing it up.

For such a delightful story, we might have wished a more developed visual style, the only aspect of the movie that is just "correct". But Gerwig's first effort still feels as a big accomplishment and this is more an opportunity area for her next film rather than something to hold against this one. Gerwig has a great sensibility for rhythm and for comedy, it is a film that keeps evolving and that has no superfluous elements in it; she knows her references and is aiming for a point between Woody Allen and Sofia Coppola, which seems to be a genuine new space that has barely been explored and that promise to be very rich and edifying for contemporary cinema.