The film, which was awarded top prize by a jury chaired by Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner, was also the winner in the separately juried First Feature Competition.
As women, our relationship with our body is always tricky. A minefield of personal insecurities and the kind of awful comments directed at us by others — or worse, no comments at all, which is also a way to put us down — we walk on the eggshells of personal self worth through our appearance. Are we too thin, not thin enough, too tall, not tall enough? And if we are just right, who should we believe? Our own selves, telling us that what we see in the mirror reflected back at us looks good, or the world, which will try to discredit our worthiness and our confidence at every chance?
In her feature debut Toxic, Lithuanian writer-director Saulė Bliuvaitė talks about a personal story, of a young girl growing up in a bleak industrial town, trying to find herself. As she writes in her director’s statement, Bliuvaitė’s film “follows the lives of young girls navigating through toxic landscapes, toxic beauty standards, and toxic relationships.”
Marija (Vesta Matulytė) has been abandoned by her mother, at 13, into the care of her grandmother. She limps but is tall, lanky and beautiful and when she chances upon troublemaker Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaitė) — who steals Marija’s jeans from her school locker — they initially fight for blood. But their combative encounter soon turns to a kind of friendship, because they both agree that the jeans are beautiful and because Kristina, with all her streetwise ways and dangerous ideals, is attractive. To Marija, who decides to follow her newfound friend into the dark world of modeling schools, in rural Eastern Europe.
As the girls are drawn into the cult-like, almost dangerously corrupt ways of the school, with its female director who at once mesmerizes the girls and strips them of their self worth and money, they begin to descend into a circle of hell. Normal teenage insecurities become bombastic in this toxic landscape and the amplification can result in disaster.
While Marija is well equipped to survive in this destructive environment — she has been bullied all her life because of her limp — Kristina’s path is one of self destruction. She tells her new friend about the research she has done for finding new and increasingly more dangerous ways to get thin, like ingesting a live tapeworm which can be bought on the dark web, but also the “pregnant woman’s urine diet,” and the “Sleeping Beauty diet” which encourages long periods of sleep achieved with the help of, probably counterfit, sleeping pills.
Toxic plays like a horror film, until its very end where it somehow redeems itself and the girls. Until then, the young protagonists constantly walk the thin line between modeling and prostitution, which of course exists in the world of fashion. The squalor of the environment, which I found truly depressing to watch, so I can’t even imagine living there, makes their choices understandable. Toxic is a word that is often used in modern jargon, favored by the Gen Zers and it applies to the girls’ choices but also their surroundings and the people who are meant to be there to protect them. At one point Kristina’s father sells his car to give her money, so she can get overpriced headshots at the modeling school and tells her “take the money and do everything you can to get out of this place.” We get it, this desperation and the need to find a way, when all the roads seem blocked to get out of town.
Still by © Akis Bado, used with permission
Cinematography is by Vytautas Katkus, who is also a filmmaker and screenwriter, and the collaboration with Bliuvaitė seems ideal. He shoots one of the final scenes from above, with a queue of girls that resembles a snake, maybe even the tapeworm they all aspire to acquire to achieve that impossibly elusive “ideal weight.”
One question begs to be answered though. Do we go to the movies to be uplifted, or to be depressed by what we watch? And in these dire times, do we reward those who capture best the squalor around us, or those who dare to transform it into something magical? Answer that question for yourself, I know my reply.
But let’s not forget that the future of cinema depends on what the audiences will choose, for the price of admission.