Lady Bird

Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film watches Christine, a Sacramento senior who has renamed herself Lady Bird. The screenplay once ran past three hundred and fifty pages under the working title Mothers and Daughters, and only one week of the shoot happened in Sacramento, with five spent in Los Angeles. Cinematographer Sam Levy put almost the entire picture on a dolly and deliberately refused the handheld look the coming of age genre wore at the time. Colour is assigned rather than found: silvery blue for the scenes with the popular crowd, a warm butterscotch for the theatre friends. The result looks like recollection rather than reportage. The structural decision that matters most is pace. A whole senior year is compressed into 94 minutes, so the first boyfriend, the audition, the money trouble and the prom each get two or three minutes and are cut just as they open. Gerwig read the script with Saoirse Ronan in a Toronto hotel room in 2015 and says she had decided by the second page. Worth it if you want the mother and the daughter to be given an equal number of moments in which each is right, and do not mind scenes closing early. Avoid it if you expect any single scene to be played to its end.