A youth film adapted from a bestselling novel that tackles difficult themes with all the humanity and cuteness possible, an independent breath of fresh air .
Comedy Queen plunges us into the daily life of Sasha, a 13-year-old girl who has just lost her mother. To cope with her grief and not get carried away by sadness, she creates a survival list whose final goal is: "to become a comedy queen! She threw herself body and soul into it, determined to change her daily life.
CLASSIC COMING OF AGE
Comedy Queen is a coming-of-age that respects its rules. As a reminder, it is a subgenre of the teen movie in which a teenage protagonist faces an ordeal that makes him grow up and brings him closer to adulthood. Here, the whole subject is the grief that Sasha has to face and the consequences it brings on his entourage and his life in general. How does she deal with her mother's absence? How does she deal with her demons?
It is thanks to his survival list that we will follow this journey, beyond his desire to do stand-up and make his depressed father smile. Identification is easy, even as an adult, and it's a deeply human, realistic portrait of a teenage girl. Everything feels natural, and we can thank the extremely accurate writing and stellar performance of the young Sigrid Johnson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd70c536LRg
BITTERSWEET
The main theme of the film is therefore mourning. It is a nuanced portrait and realism is all the more reinforced by this wholesale refusal of Manichaeism. Sometimes sad, sometimes joyful, from laughter to tears. A portrait of a lost kid who does not lose his child's enthusiasm. We have the impression that life goes on but that dramatic moments can occur at any moment and explode in our faces.
It's an emotional roller coaster as a spectator, we are laid foundations and sometimes they explode. Everything is agitated: it screams, the music is racing, the camera takes us into sequence shots that move in all directions, the nerves are raw. We quickly understand that it is like a time bomb, and that it is a film in front of which our tears will flow at least once. It's a tear puller that makes you smile when you haven't had time to dry your face yet.
A STRENGTH OF CHARACTER
While it fits perfectly into its cliché of independent coming of age, whether purely script/thematic or aesthetic, the film also manages to create a clear identity, a real character. The choices of staging are strong and assumed, we have for example a real work of blur which represents this choice always to ensure that the technique follows the emotions of the main character. Everything is linked to Sasha and how she feels: a voice-over narration, but also a constant agitation with very few fixed shots among others, and a shaky cam that is almost never absent.
To this we add an exceptional cast from A to Z, a crucial sense of humanity and naturalness and above all… The central character: Sasha, of course. She is a rebellious and terrified 13-year-old girl who has a lot of spirit and who does not hesitate to express herself, no matter how violent her feelings are. It is an archetype that could quickly annoy but here we find a happy medium that works and moves. She carries the film without difficulty and we are quickly hung on her reactions. Comedy Queen is a cute little independent film with a very strong theme that will make you waver from one emotion to another, but that can hardly leave indifferent.
Currently in theaters.
