Mixtape

The last days of 1999. Twelve year old Beverly lives with her grandmother; her parents died when she was a baby and her grandmother never speaks of them. Beverly finds an old cassette in the house, a mixtape her parents made as teenagers. The tape is broken but the list of songs on it can still be read. She decides to find each of those songs. She goes to the record shop, to the library, and makes new friends. Valerie Weiss directs. Gemma Brooke Allen plays Beverly and Julie Bowen plays her grandmother. It was released on Netflix. What the narrative builds is the tracklist as a document: which songs were chosen, in what order, and what that says. Beverly is trying to know her parents through their taste in music. The songs are drawn from the punk and independent rock of the period and that music makes up the film's ground. The choice of year is functional: the days of the millennium scare, before the internet made everything easy to find. Her search is therefore a physical one. The grandmother is the second strand; she lost her daughter and refuses to talk. Its limit is its shape; the conflicts resolve easily and the ending leans on an emotional gathering. Who it is for: viewers who like youth films, music driven family pictures and nineties nostalgia. Who it is not for: the narrative is predictable, the conflict is low, and the film takes no risk anywhere.