Cheer Up – and, more importantly, never ever give up

Cheer Up is the sweetly told story of an unsuccessful cheerleading team from a remote Arctic Circle town in Finland over several years as they experience highs and lows on and off the floor and try never to give up.  It mainly focuses on a trio of interesting and contrasting characters – coach Miia, and teenage team members Patu and Aino.

Cheer Up offers an interesting portrait of loneliness and sadness mixed with hope and determination and does not go for any hokey Hollywood story or clinical neatness. Instead it is gentle, affectionate and heartfelt, capturing small significant personal cares that maybe don’t fit to the overall story of the team, but which are personal and feel very natural and real. There are moments of genuine sadness, particularly in Patu’s story as she deals with grief and family challenges, and also episodes of wonderfully blunt humour, most memorably with Miia’s dating adventures.

But as genuinely nice and enjoyable as the film is, and despite brimming with some proper characters – especially irrepressible Miia – the film doesn’t quite add up to more than the sum of its parts.  Perhaps it is because of a slight lack of structure and focus, we drift in and out of the team and it feels a bit more like three vaguely connected story rather than three parts of the whole.  The three individual stories could have been lost in a tighter or neater story, and it is definitely an upside that they weren’t. The film will leave you with a smile on your face, but perhaps not quite deliver the emotional punch or impact that is had the potential to do.

Bliss! - searching in all the wrong places

I genuinely don’t like to rip into a movie that clearly didn’t have much budget behind it but Bliss is a very disappointing waste of potential. It is the story of a teenage girl, Tasha, who discovers her father is not the abusive one she was brought up with and takes herself off to Norway to find him was an interesting premise that doesn’t deliver.

There were some good elements.  Freya Park’s gives a good performance with little to work from bringing out Tasha’s teenage confusion, wistfulness and determination and there is some gentle charisma in support from Lars Arentz-Hansen. The film looks pretty enough in outdoor scenes (some internal shots weren’t properly in focus) and director Rita Osei has a good eye for getting maximum impact out of a nice location.

The problem is an incredibly weak, sub-soap opera script, worsened by some really poor editing. Nearly every scene is cut ridiculously short, often four or five lines in. Tasha’s journey’s climax is at a music festival, a singer begins to sing a song and then about a minute in, it just cuts to the end, instead of giving us the full scene and a sense that we actually built to something.  The dialogue is flat and often very cheesy. This means there is no chance for the development of characters or for the story or film to breathe. The film is then further suffocated by an incredibly jarring and overwhelming score which sucks the drama out of the scenes rather than supporting it.

The fact that I did care a bit about Tasha and what happened to her, and found her believable is a credit to Parks who deserved a better vehicle than Bliss.

The Fits - the world is unsettling and beautiful through a child's eyes

The Fits is a stunning and engrossing study of a young girl’s desire to belong. It tells the story of Toni, a young boxer, who trains with and helps out her brother at a local gym. Toni becomes intrigued by the dynamic and raucous girls’ dance troupe that trains at the centre. She joins the group just as an epidemic of unexplained fits affects one girl after the other, affecting the close knit dynamic of the group and making the unaffected Toni feel like an outsider all over again.

The Fits has all the ingredients to be an excellent film anyway, but it is truly elevated by a phenomenal performance from Royalty Hightower.  She perfectly captures Toni’s confused emotions, desire to belong and committed intensity but also beautifully portrays lightness and joy and imagination. It is not just a wonderfully nuanced performance but also a physical challenge which she meets superbly.

In the post-film Q&A, director Anna Rose Holmer explained that the film-makers had expected to cast an older girl than Hightower, who was around 9 years old at the time of filming. Not only is it near impossible to imagine anyone else in the role, but has the added benefit of allowing a curious child eye’s view into the film, a very different perspective to a teenager’s.

Hightower’s performance is surrounded by a poetically beautiful and deeply intriguing and mysterious film. The direction by Holmer is wonderfully assured, with the fits themselves shot stunningly and evocatively. The dancers and boxers amazing physical prowess is beautifully and viscerally captured. The pacing of the film adds to the otherworldliness.  The film deliberately gives no simple answers, instead we fully get Toni’s sense of mystery of the new world she has entered and it’s suddenly strange goings on.  The story takes place almost all in one location and much of it is seen from Toni’s perspective behind a door, through a window or otherwise slightly physically isolated. It is an incredibly effective way to create the contagious and oppressive atmosphere as the fits spread and to capture Toni’s emotional journey.

The Fits is a unique and beguiling film which suggests a very bright and brilliant future for both actress Hightower and director Holmer.