THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Few early works are as uninhibited as Tiger Stripesby Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu. Selected in May 2023 at Critics’ Week in Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix, this horror film about puberty takes literally the criticism that overwhelms teenage girls: “Stand straight!” » In a rural community, on the edge of the jungle, Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) literally exceeds the role of model little girl that her mother and her teachers want to assign to her.
Despite the bans, she stole a bra, pulled on the straps to show off, took off her veil to frolic in the river and catch frogs… When her first period came, her body became the scene of disturbing metamorphoses, which reveal his fury and rage. The film comes at the right time to embody the feminist slogan, taken from actress Judith Godrèche’s speech at the Césars ceremony on February 23: “Little girls are punks. »
Borrowing from the Hong Kong B series of the Shaw brothers in the 1950s and 1960s, Tiger Stripes proceeds from a riot of kitsch special effects, with cartoonish characters, accelerated movements, trances and screams… Enamelled with scenes captured on mobile phones – by the young actresses themselves – the film gives an account, in a astonishing freedom, of the contemporary adolescent experience where it is no longer just a question of examining oneself in front of the mirror, but through the image sent back by social networks.
Alternative fantasies
Inspired by Southeast Asian folklore, Tiger Stripes also brings to mind the work of French director Julia Ducournau, begun with Juniorin 2011. In this gory short film, a teenager of the same age as Zaffan, suffering from an alleged fulminating gastroenteritis, shed like an animal, which forced her to lift in clusters pieces of skin ready to fall off .
At Amanda Nell Eu, the general picture of growth includes nails that come off, hair that grows in clumps, huge pustules but also fluorescent eyes and other alternative fantasies.
While the young girl scares herself, the progression of the plot plays, in fits and starts, between shame and the expression of a wild freedom which celebrates the wedding of the beautiful and the ugly, of the frightening and sublime… While just a few years ago the power of young girls was housed in a form of mischievous romanticism, we are witnessing a brutal transformation which has less to do with seduction than with the advent of ‘a person.
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