The prodigywith the ascendant Florence PugIt starts off really weird. Strange. As the camera pans across the filming set, with the sets assembled, a female voice-over (we later learn it’s actress Niamh Algar, one of the co-stars) tells us what we’ll see.
It’s a pretentious opening, if nothing else, that unnecessarily breaks the fourth wall. Nothing that will be seen after, until the end, will justify it.
The Chilean Sebastian Lelio (Oscar-winning Best Foreign Language Film director a fantastic woman; Glory) adapts the 2016 novel by Emma Donaghue (author of The roomand also from her screenplay), which focuses on two female characters in post-famine Ireland, circa 1860. One is Lib, an English nurse whom the actress in Black Widow He puts all his dedication, passion and energy, that he arrives in a small town to observe -they tell him- Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), an 11-year-old girl who hasn’t eaten for four months and, despite this, she is fantastic of health.
Lib doesn’t come alone, as the doctor who hired her (a slightly drunk Toby Jones, as well as Ciarán Hinds, who plays a village cleric) has also hired a nun. The idea is that both women, taking turns every eight hours, are there, together with Anna, to see if it’s a miracle or what.
The nun’s presence also has to do with the fact that Anna’s family is very devout. The prodigy it’s more about the power of faith, or how “reality” can confront more radical religious beliefs.
Lib understands that if this continues, Anna will starve. But how does Anna fare reasonably well? Is it the power of faith? Why voluntary fasting?
You don’t have to reveal anything, because the film takes care of it, and involves Lib in questions of different acceptance, between science and faith. And if he discovers “the truth”, as we can guess, what should he do?
a great performer
Florence Pugh is a great actress. She forgets she saw it Black Widow. The Oscar-nominated interpreter for Little Womenin which we have also seen mid summerand it was the only thing that resisted Don’t worry honeyrecently released, with Harry Styles, he is almost always on the screen, and makes his creature believable like perhaps no other character in Lelio’s film.
His character hides the pain, and it is from there that Lib will not give up in his attempt to save Anna. This is how he can hug the girl’s mother, and that he can hear a story from Anna’s mouth that makes his hair stand on end.
The prodigy looks more like a fantastic woman Oh Glory that the last thing the Chilean director did (disobedience, with Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams), which had its religious side: the love of one Orthodox Jewish woman for another. Here Lelio focuses once again on female protagonists, almost his specialty, and he has had an interpreter who transmits to the bone.
“The Prodigy”
Good
Drama. Ireland/UK/USA, 2022. 108′, SAM 16. Of: Sebastian Lelio. With: Florence Pugh, Tom Burke, Kila Lord Cassidy, Toby Jones. Available in: Netflix.
Source: Clarin
