This review contains SPOILERS, I'm trying to save you from seeing this movie.
I started watching this movie thinking I was going to like it. It looked like a coming of age tale, the 1950's Irish setting seemed appealing, the characters seemed interesting. The main character is a large, unattractive girl, Bennie, from a small town, and the story centers around her and her two friends, Eve and Nan. Eve was a simple girl with a moralistic bent, raised in a convent, while Nan grew up a sophisticated, big city girl in Dublin. The story really gets going while the three are at university. For a while it seemed like a sweet coming of age tale of some sort, but I should have been suspicious when all the excerpts of college lectures dealt with the sexual practices of savages, and with all the talk about sex, between the girls and between Bennie and her new boyfriend, a jock on campus and a pre-med major.
The movie goes along pretty innocently for quite a while. The girls were in school, and it looked like the girls were striving to expand their horizons, improve their situation. They go to a dance and are caught up with boyfriends. Then a lot of the action is compressed in the last half hour of the movie, turning the whole thing into a big, sappy soap opera. Nan services some guy, get rejected by the buffoon when they discover she's pregnant, then seduces Bennie's boyfriend in an attempt to trick HIM into marrying her. Eve finds out, approaches Nan with a bread knife, causing Nan to fall, get cut, and lose the baby. The boyfriend then returns to Bennie and she takes him back, and the movie ends as these two are finally about to go all the way. As it ends, you don't feel uplifted, Bennie hasn't learned anything or grown, she remains a big, unattractive girl, now with a boyfriend that knows he graze in greener pastures once in a while and she'll take him back.
I started watching this movie thinking I was going to like it. It looked like a coming of age tale, the 1950's Irish setting seemed appealing, the characters seemed interesting. The main character is a large, unattractive girl, Bennie, from a small town, and the story centers around her and her two friends, Eve and Nan. Eve was a simple girl with a moralistic bent, raised in a convent, while Nan grew up a sophisticated, big city girl in Dublin. The story really gets going while the three are at university. For a while it seemed like a sweet coming of age tale of some sort, but I should have been suspicious when all the excerpts of college lectures dealt with the sexual practices of savages, and with all the talk about sex, between the girls and between Bennie and her new boyfriend, a jock on campus and a pre-med major.
The movie goes along pretty innocently for quite a while. The girls were in school, and it looked like the girls were striving to expand their horizons, improve their situation. They go to a dance and are caught up with boyfriends. Then a lot of the action is compressed in the last half hour of the movie, turning the whole thing into a big, sappy soap opera. Nan services some guy, get rejected by the buffoon when they discover she's pregnant, then seduces Bennie's boyfriend in an attempt to trick HIM into marrying her. Eve finds out, approaches Nan with a bread knife, causing Nan to fall, get cut, and lose the baby. The boyfriend then returns to Bennie and she takes him back, and the movie ends as these two are finally about to go all the way. As it ends, you don't feel uplifted, Bennie hasn't learned anything or grown, she remains a big, unattractive girl, now with a boyfriend that knows he graze in greener pastures once in a while and she'll take him back.