\n\tSPOILER ALERT: The following review contains mild spoilers.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor decades, the Motion Picture Association\u2019s film ratings system \u2014 devised by the American studios to advise parents and avoid censorship \u2014 offered clear guidelines on whether the material contained in any given Hollywood release was appropriate for children. The organization was mostly concerned about sex and violence, though it also cautioned audiences about something vaguely described as \u201cadult situations,\u201d which young viewers might find overwhelming or otherwise difficult to process.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe standout of this year\u2019s Sundance Film Festival<\/a> competition, in terms of both audacity of subject and maturity of execution, \u201cJosephine<\/a>\u201d is a movie in which the eponymous child (vulnerably embodied by newcomer Mason Reeves) is prematurely forced to deal with adult situations. Inspired by traumatic events in writer-director Beth de Ara\u00fajo\u2019s own childhood, it\u2019s the story of an 8-year-old girl who witnesses something no child should see \u2014 a sexual assault between two strangers \u2014 and her ensuing struggle to make sense of a crime she can\u2019t begin to comprehend.<\/p>\n \n\tEarly one Sunday morning, while running through Golden Gate Park with her father (Channing Tatum), Josephine takes a wrong turn. From her spot on a hill, she happens to observe a strange man following a female jogger into one of the public bathrooms. Then come the screams. When the woman exits, her assailant throws her to the ground, rips off her clothes and overpowers her. Even (or perhaps especially) seen from a distance, the attack is disturbing to watch, and though the culprit is swiftly apprehended, thanks to the quick action of Josephine\u2019s sporty dad, the damage is done.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cJosephine\u201d eventually builds to a big courtroom scene where its title character courageously agrees to testify, but de Ara\u00fajo seems less concerned with the verdict (which the movie withholds) than she is with recognizing how the experience impacts Josephine, reshaping how she views the world going forward. Developed through the Sundance Labs, de Ara\u00fajo\u2019s second feature (following 2022\u2019s stunning single-shot thriller \u201cSoft & Quiet,\u201d about white supremacists hiding in plain sight) fits the dominant theme of this year\u2019s festival \u2014 coping with trauma \u2014 but does so in a psychologically complex way.<\/p>\n \n\tAs Josephine\u2019s mom (Gemma Chan) eventually tells her daughter, there\u2019s no way to go through life without bad things happening: \u201cIt is your responsibility for you to fix your own pain,\u201d she says, and in that advice,<\/p>\n \n\tIt may sound strange to use the word \u201csubtle\u201d to describe a film that opens with a brutal assault, and yet, the sensitive writer-director excels in constructing a universal human experience out of incredibly specific details (whether drawn from memory, research or her imagination). The moments immediately following the crime are especially powerful, as the filmmaker puts us in Josephine\u2019s place. \u201cDon\u2019t move!\u201d her dad orders \u2014 which also happens to be the title of de Ara\u00fajo\u2019s autobiographical segment for The Moth \u2014 before dashing after the perp.<\/p>\n \n\tLeft behind with a police officer, Josephine must have felt like she was the one being punished, as he locked her in the back of his squad car with the survivor (Syra McCarthy). The moment stretches into a kind of eternity, marked by tactile details: searching for a seatbelt, wanting to console this crying woman, identifying with a bug trapped against the window. In a telling moment, Josephine seems to feel helpful when asked to find the woman\u2019s hair tie among the weeds. And then there\u2019s the long moment, which will haunt her for the rest of the film, in which she locks eyes with the suspect (Philip Ettinger).<\/p>\n \n\tRaised in a household that never discussed sex, Josephine has no way of understanding what she\u2019d seen. (Watching the scene a second time, it\u2019s admirable to recognize how de Ara\u00fajo protected her child star from the truth of what she was playing. Even more impressive is how much Reeves conveys without fully knowing.) As the girl\u2019s ignorance begets further consequences, from acting out at school to the way she looks at unfamiliar men from then on, the filmmaker\u2019s skill comes in embracing a certain ambiguity.<\/p>\n \n\tInstead of forcing an interpretation upon her audience, de Ara\u00fajo trusts us to make sense of her characters\u2019 contradictory, if not downright counterproductive mindsets. For example, no one here has the slightest idea how to handle Josephine after the incident. When she asks her dad, \u201cWhat was that man doing?\u201d he immediately changes the subject, acting like nothing happened. At home, Josephine\u2019s mom acknowledges the family\u2019s tradition of avoiding tough subjects, describing it as the reason she never goes to her own mother for help as an adult. And yet, she\u2019s helpless to discuss what happened with her daughter, who\u2019s clearly desperate for an explanation.<\/p>\n \n\tOverhearing an unfamiliar word (but not knowing how to spell it), Josephine types R-A-I-P into the search engine, researching the concept \u201cof rape\u201d on her own \u2014 which anyone can agree is the wrong way to learn. Her mom suggests they bring Josephine to a psychologist (a response a child might misconstrue as some kind of penalty), while her adversity-makes-us-stronger dad enrolls Josephine in self-defense classes. From here on, one of the movie\u2019s more nuanced developments is how the girl gravitates toward \u2014 or else rejects \u2014 each of her parents at different stages. Arguably the film\u2019s most moving scene occurs between Josephine and her mother in the car, when the child bluntly asks, \u201cWere you ever raped?\u201d and the truth comes indirectly, contradicting her answer, through a single tear.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cJosephine\u201d serves up multiple reasons for audiences to cry, nearly all of which come from moments of solidarity. (The director dealt with her own trauma by volunteering for a crisis hotline, and that experience clearly informs her screenplay.) In her testimonial for \u201cThe Moth,\u201d de Ara\u00fajo describes never getting closure with the survivor of the assault she was privy to as a child. As if to rectify that, she gives Josephine her moment in court, where the girl is cross-examined by a skeptical female lawyer (Dana Millican), as well as a symbolic reunion near the end of the film. In real life, de Ara\u00fajo\u2019s father warned, \u201cYou\u2019re not a welcome memory for her.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhile some might find it triggering, \u201cJosephine\u201d dares to confront the life-shattering intersection of sex and violence in our culture, facing the toughest of \u201cadult situations\u201d with clear eyes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains mild spoilers. For decades, the Motion Picture Association\u2019s film ratings system \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430492,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[83754,178901,49,48,75,178903,337,79083],"class_list":["post-430491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-berlin-film-festival","tag-beth-de-araujo","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-josephine","tag-movies","tag-sundance-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}