Summary
A film that hooks you from the start with its foreboding, jaw-dropping photography and strong feminist themes. This Sundance debut hits the international market to drag us away in this allegorical fantasy.
It would be very easy to say that Karen Cinorre’s stunning debut MAYDAY arrives in a timely fashion during the #MeToo movement. It does, of course, but this modern fable is also a surrealist repudiation of so many cinematic tropes.
We meet the ostensible lead Ana (Grace Van Patten) as a staff member at a wedding, where is is alternatively comforting the bride and being verbally and physically abused by her employers. During a terrible storm, she is transported like Alice down a rabbit hole (in this case an oven) and washed ashore an island.
This new reality is run by Marsha (Mia Goth) and her troupe of ‘lost girls’ in military uniform (Soko and Havana Rose Liu). They appear to be at war with a group of male soldiers, and use an old radio like a siren’s call to lure sailors to their doom.
Cinorre’s dreamlike structure doesn’t offer any easy answers, from the World War II trappings to the nature of Ana’s transportation. It vibes a little like Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy, another modern take on Peter Pan. Yet the duality of some characters – versions of Marsha and Juliette Lewis’s characters (a bathroom attendant/mechanic) appear in both realities – point more to Oz than Neverland.
Like the best speculative fantasy, Cinorre uses the setting to explore our society. Women make the best snipers, Martha surmises, because it requires being uncomfortable for hours and largely invisible. “You’ve been at war your whole life,” Ana is told, “you just don’t know it.” Left alone, Ana is still vulnerable to male violence, dubbing herself an “easy target.” Subtle it is not, but neither is the dominant male paradigm.
Working with cinematographer Sam Levy (Lady Bird, Francis Ha, Wendy and Lucy), Cinorre has crafted a film of beautiful visual contrasts. The shoreline and seaside vistas are often stunning, juxtaposed with the dark orange and red washes of the underground. It wouldn’t be a fantasy without a random musical sequence in there too, a moment of high levity in which Ana dances with soldiers. It prompts one of the girls to ask her if she’s “switched sides,” a line that’s only slightly laden with double meaning.
Working like a repeated meme, the titular ‘Mary Alpha Yankee Delta Alpha Yankee’ echoes through to the action-based conclusion. It can never hope to maintain its initial intensity for the duration, but one gets the feeling that we’ll be pondering and returning to this over the coming days, weeks, and months. This is not, after all, a film about going to war: it is about supporting each other. Ana’s choices in the final act are positive ones, and while it all might collapse like the dream she has built, it gives birth to something new.
2021 | USA | DIRECTOR: Karen Cinorre | WRITER: Karen Cinorre | CAST: Grace Van Patten, Mia Goth, Havana Rose Liu, Soko, Théodore Pellerin, Juliette Lewis | DISTRIBUTOR: Mayday Pictures LLC, International Film Festival Rotterdam | RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 31 January 2021 (Sundance), 1-7 February 2021 (NL)
