Cherrybomb at 39th Gifonni Film Festival, South Italy

By Aldo Spiniello

Translated by Anna and Ivana

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This is a classic love triangle. One woman causes a crisis between two friends, whose desire conspires against the precarious balance of affection.

Belfast suburbia. Luke deals drugs for his elder brother and takes care of his alcoholic father. Mal, a model son from an ordinary family, works in a big sports centre. There’s a strong bond between them, despite the differences. At least until the arrival of the dark and provocative Michelle, the daughter of the sports centre owner. She sets a fire that is initially contained, but then increasingly unstoppable and devastating. A splendid “bomb” who blast into the monotonous daily life and turns it to pieces. All this passion, when it comes down to it, is a way to challenge the boring normality. But, at times, this passion appear as a mirage, an empty dream animated with an undefined desire to escape to another life, another world.

This seems to be the point around which Cherrybomb, the first feature film by Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa, screened at the last Berlin festival, focuses. This is a straightforward cinema that however knows how to tell the the tale about the illusory and frustrating search for freedom, for authentic feelings, beyond the life which keeps you in the cage by means of suffocatingly family bonds. The pair of directors don’t waste their time trying to demonstrate a strikingly original style, they have faith in the pale face of Rupert Grint (who has finally freed himself from the Harry Potter label), and they content themselves with a few simple solutions, such as the text messages materializing onto the screen, as the sign of an increasingly shorter and more painful communication.

This is a straigtforward film which offers a dramatic and effective progression and suddenly diverts unexpectedly from an absent-minded tone to an unexpected end, despite the alarm signals being sent from the very first scene. But in any case the final tragedy doesn’t surprise us. It seems like a natural consequence of things, like in Skolimowski’s The Deep End. It is an obvious ending for the silly adolescents, lost in their impossible dream of breaking out. And it is a deserved sentence for a family who increasingly appear like a cell invaded and mutated by a lethal cancer.