If you took your impression of teenage girlhood from mainstream movies, you’d think it was all about football games and the prom and finally getting to hook up with the boy or girl of your choice. The real life of a teenage girl in America is very different, of course—it’s the time when you start learning to negotiate the adult world, determine who you are and how you do or don’t differ from your family and friends, and decide what you want to do about that. It’s also a time of intense friendships and heartbreaking betrayals, of picking at psychic scabs and, if all goes well, emerging from the process stronger and closer to becoming yourself. It’s easy to see why most movies go for the familiar tropes rather than explore the lived experience of being an adolescent girl—it’s a lot easier, audiences can immediately relate, and it’s the stuff blockbusters are made of.
Clara Roquet’s Libertad, her first feature film as a director, takes the road less travelled. She focuses on small moments in the lives of two young women, Nora (Maria Morera) and Libertad (Nicolle Garcia) who are spending the summer at a vacation home on the Costa Brava. One thing they have in common, besides their gender and age, is that neither of them wants to be there. Beyond that, their life experiences are quite different, as are the likely futures that await them.
Nora is the daughter of the well-off family at whose vacation home the story is set, while Libertad is the daughter of the family’s Colombian maid, Rosana (Carol Hurtado), and is seeing her mother for the first time in years (since Rosana left Colombia to take this job, in fact). Also on hand is Nora’s grandmother Ángela (Vicky Peña), who may be slipping mentally but also has a tendency to speak truths that others would prefer to ignore, and Nora’s mother Teresa (Nora Navas), who’s trying to act like everything’s OK while it most definitely is not.
Teresa thinks of herself as a good person who isn’t hung up on class distinctions and initially makes an effort to welcome Libertad, offering her the loan of a bicycle (the nearest town is 3 km away, a long walk in the summer sun) and letting the girls pal around together when Libertad is not working. There may be some self-interest in the latter impulse as well, because having a friend her own age might bring Nora out of her shell or at least improve her mood.
That good-natured tolerance doesn’t last long, as it becomes clear that that two girls have quite different ways of living in the world. Nora has always been the good bourgeois daughter her mother expects her to be, while Libertad is a bold risk-taker who likes to have a good time and induces Nora to stay out late and take part in her adventures. That’s definitely not on the menu for a nice Spanish girl living in a world in which the appearance of impropriety can be as damning, for a woman, as any actual transgression.
Teresa tries to put her foot down, forbidding Nora from associating with Libertad, but you can imagine how well that works out, especially since Nora knows her mother doesn’t practice what she preaches. You can’t stop someone from growing up, and now that Nora has seen the realities of the world outside her bubble of privilege and restriction, she can’t unsee them.
Libertad is structured like Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years in that it spends most of its running time building up a picture of fairly ordinary lives, then delivers a real kicker at the very end, the import of which is told on the face of one of the characters rather than through direct exposition. It’s also a film of shifting moods and subtle moments that relies a great deal on the skill of its two young leads. Fortunately, both are up to the task, with Morera a particular standout at the difficult task of conveying the emotional journey of a character who is not overtly expressive. Gris Jordana’s cinematography echoes the delicacy of the girls’ inner lives and capturing the differences of the two worlds in which they live, even though they’re in the same geographic location. | Sarah Boslaugh
Libertad is distributed on VOD by Film Movement Plus.
