'The wild girl': tears for a 'best seller' of 15 million copies

2022-09-30T10:37:31.902Z

The secret of its success lies in a search for the most primal emotions, and it could be compared to a much better movie: 'Fried Green Tomatoes'

For some time now, a certain type of film, previously common and even dominant on billboards, has almost disappeared from the map.

And for the recovery of theaters, in competition with both platforms and laziness, it is necessary for cinema on the big screen to be diverse, for each type of viewer to find what they are demanding.

In other words, in order to try to return to respectable total collection figures, it is not only necessary that the

blockbuster

turn make a million, and that the family and the animation continue pulling the car.

There is also a need for great auteur films, stimulating avant-garde cinema, and intimate and exciting stories that cause the once-adult viewer in search of sentimental experiences, now sheltered above all in series, to recover the value of darkness and classic projection.

And in this last section titles like

The wild girl enter.

Not necessarily good, because it's not (not bad either), but surely attractive to part of the public.

More information

The literary adaptations that will hit the screens in 2022

Where the Crawdads Sings,

the film's original title, is based on a novel of the same name by Delia Owens, a retired veteran biologist who has found enormous success with her first approach to fictional literature.

Published in 2018, it has sold a whopping 15 million copies worldwide, and perhaps the secret of its success also consists in that search for the most primal emotions.

Class and racial conflicts, the rejection of difference and dissidence, gender violence, the impossibility of love between different social strata and, of course, a crime that directly affects the heroine of the story make up a story set between the fifties and sixties, which on screen has been directed by Olivia Newman, until now focused on television series.

For the reader to frame the type of film that

Wild Girl is,

it would be good to go back to a (relatively) modern classic like

Fried Green Tomatoes

(1991).

Saving the distances, of course, because this one is far from reaching the quality and charisma of Jon Avnet's.

Even so, the coincidences are not few: southern environment (the swamps and marshes of North Carolina), social, racial and gender prejudices, mistreatment, structure based on a handful of

flashbacks

(five, in this case), and alleged self-defense crime of a young woman who has seen since she was a child how her independence was seen by the microcosm of a small town as a laughable form of wild life.

To a story that could be the subject of any low-end telefilm, the director gives it a placid but intense rhythm, and an elegant visualization that, with the additions of contact with nature that the original novel already has, makes good use of the beauty of their locations, punctuated by the beautiful soundtrack by the prestigious Mychael Danna.

So,

the wild girl

It is configured as a somewhat mellifluous film, although never cheesy, that seeks the most effective and restorative tear for the fan of this type of novels and cinematographic products, but along a path that is not creepy either.

Of course, the treatment of conflicts lacks depth (mainly racial and gender conflicts), and that the moments dedicated to judgment and their resolution are based on brushstrokes rather than brushstrokes.

But those addicted to sentimentality and melodrama can feel at home, between comfort and the inevitable handkerchief for crying.