Ginger & Rosa – Sally Potter’s 2012 film is a mini-masterpiece

Often considered Sally Potter’s most accessible film, primarily because it adheres to a more conventional structure than her earlier work (such as 2004’s Yes ), Ginger & Rosa (2012) depicts the adolescent challenges faced by two teenage girls through the prism of the social changes taking place in Britain in the early 1960s.

Terrific acting by the whole cast, and deeply intelligent scriptwriting and direction by Potter, instil the movie with the sense of real life. Ginger & Rosa reminds us that cinema need not be banal to be entertaining, and reaffirms the medium’s power to delve into emotionally rich and deep territory without becoming ponderous or overly introspective. In short, it’s a mini-masterpiece.

Set at a time when Britain was on the cusp of the social and sexual revolutions, the film focuses on the friendship of a pair of working-class girls, Ginger (Elle Fanning) and Rosa (Alice Englert). The two start off close but ructions occur when Rosa takes an interest in Ginger’s moody, existentialist father.

Potter says that the film, like all her work, began with semi-autobiographical elements, and notes that she was on the ban-the-bomb marches, so knows the time she is depicting well. But she adds that Ginger & Rosa took on a life of its own and became a work of fiction as soon as her imagination took hold.