[yasr_overall_rating]
While training at the gym 11-year-old tomboy Toni becomes entranced with a dance troupe. As she struggles to fit in she finds herself caught up in danger as the group begins to suffer from fainting spells and other violent fits.
“The Fits” is the story of Tony, an introverted adolescent who is confronted with the question of either continuing her boxing training with her brother or joining a female dancing group.
The movie starts with a fascinating frontal shot of Tony as she is training, doing sit-ups in silence, looking right in the camera, into your eye. You can hear all the noise that surrounds her, but nothing comes out of her lips, at least for the first third of the movie. Director Anna Rose Holmer decided to cast the eleven-year-old Royalty Hightower as her main character exactly because of that reason. Tony is not mute, nor does she have any speaking disabilities, she just does not need words to express her emotions in front of the camera.
Other characters try to talk with her, establish communication, like her brother Jermaine (Da’Sean Minor); she just nods or doesn’t pay attention, but the level of empathy that she creates with the audience is enormous. Believe me and keep an eye on her, she is GOLDEN. It is very rare to see this kind of talent in independent movies, since they normally can’t afford the achievement of a global casting agency until they find their Daisy Ridley.
The impression I got watching this movie was the same as eating food, cooked with love at a friend’s house – you feel that all was made with affection. Anna Rose Holmer collaborated with Queen City Boxing Club and the Q-Kidz Dance Team (represented in the film as the Lionesses) to cast real teenagers from the film location (Cincinnati). “Working with young athletes allowed us to focus in the physically and nuanced movements we needed to tell the story […] and casting all the girls from the same real-life dance team meant that we could emphasize the authentic sisterhood and collective memory-making that young women experience when they bond on a team” said Anna Rose Holmer. This is a recipe that works.
It is obvious that the film has the perfect ingredients to make it a Lifetime movie candidate, but suddenly, (SPOILER) around the last third of the movie all the female characters start to fall ill. A mysterious virus is spreading to all the members of the female dancing group. And it is here where the movie gets its importance. The girls start to get seizures and spasms, with no one able to figure out the reason behind those occurrences.
At first they think it’s the water, making here a clear resemblance with the Flint water catastrophe, even though the movie was shot a year before the disaster. But curiously it is only affecting the female students. As they try to find out the reasons we slowly realize that it might be a neurotic case. The philosophical point of view catches us off-guard. Is the self a virus? Is identity a disease? How much of yourself is it licit to loose to be accepted? We are facing a case of mass Paroxysm as a new form of being cool. (END OF SPOILERS).
“The Fits” is a global story such as Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” There is a certain beauty in the way this movie reveals its message. When you think the film is about how male and female differentiate from each other in the way genders choose their after-school activities, you are not completely wrong, but “The Fits” keeps an ace up its sleeve that will knock you out.
“The Fits” is currently playing in New York, Los Angeles and Pasadena and will open in North Hollywood June 17th
