Ripe

The most depressing thing about Ripe is that you can spot the core of emotional honesty buried beneath the lurid melodrama and clunky symbolism. The sexual awakening of teenage girls is an uncommon subject in film, which is reason enough to hope for the best from Mo Ogrodnik's tale of 14-year-old fraternal twins (Daisy Eagan and Monica Keena), who survive a car crash which claims the lives of their parents then set off alone on a road of discovery. Ogrodinik chooses to frame Ripe as a sort of surreal cautionary tale on the perils of unsupervised youth, with a pair of troubled teenagers facing the changes in their lives and their bodies without the benefit of adult counsel. That's a nice starting point. Unfortunately, the surrealism soon degenerates into metaphorical heavy-handedness. Rosie and Violet (named as flowers-about-to-bloom with sledgehammer subtlety) represent divergent reactions to the first flush of sexual awareness, but they never become more than representations; real-life 14-year-olds Eagan and Keena can't do much with characters which are written as types. Instead of authenticity, Ripe offers a parade of numbingly obvious foreshadowing and situations which shift the emphasis from sensitive observation to spectacle and sleaziness. Shock value and controversy may be good for helping the video move off the shelves; however, they're poor substitutes for narrative truth. A less self-consciously "provocative" Ripe could have been the kind of honest drama which a mother and daughter could share and learn from together. Instead, it will likely become more popular with middle-aged men in trenchcoats. Not recommended. (S. Renshaw)