#vqiff

The Vancouver Queer Film Festival is back on and Im volunteering once again, along with seeing a few films, so heres the first one...

Girls Lost (Pojkarna) - Vancouver Queer Film Festival - 2016

Girls lost follows three Swedish teenage girls who are the bottom of their schools social hierarchy as they go on a tragic journey of self discovery. This is navigated through a supernatural twist which allows the teens to body-swap into their ‘boy-selves’. Reminiscent of 80’s body transformation movies but without the comedy Girls Lost presented a bleak, often narcissistic viewpoint on figuring out who you are and who you want to be.

Following Kim (our key protagonist) as she becomes more and more submerged in her male body counterpart we witness her confidence flourish and the appeal of extreme masculine (or destructive) events take hold. Her escalation into destructive behaviour happened so quickly it caught me off guard, one minute she is a self conscious timid 14 year old girl, the next she is a wild ‘fringe’ boy who smokes pot, drinks, takes random drugs from friends, breaks into houses, steels cars, half kills a boy who she fell in love with, and then gets her arson on. It was interesting to watch but a little overly dramatic and intense.

While the fantasy elements were interesting and I enjoyed the scenes where they transformed from girls into boys (using close up soft blends) the movie’s complicated depiction of attraction is just frustrating. The unrequited-love-triangle plot amounts to something like “girl-turns-boy-meets-boy, girl-turns-boy-turns-girl-loves-girl.”. Girls Lost drags a bit and was a little unsubtly stating its themes. “Sometimes it feels like I have a zipper somewhere,” Kim confesses to Momo early on, before she’s become a boy. “If I’m brave enough to pull it, that’s the real me.” - so when she finally became a boy and realized its who she was it wasn't very surprising.