As millennials age through adulthood and rapidly toward slipping out of the key 18-34 demographic, it’s worth pondering what movie will come to define that generation. Though obvious choices like The Social Network or Mean Girls or perhaps even The Dark Knight come to mind, writer-director Jordan Blady’s Softness of Bodies may also deserve to be in the running.
The film follows Charlie (Dasha Nekrasova), an aspiring young poet living in Berlin. Working in a coffee shop by day and sleeping with a man who already has a girlfriend most nights, Charlie’s aimless life is suddenly threatened when she’s arrested for shoplifting. Told to scrape together 800€ or be deported, Charlie struggles to not only come up with the money in time, but try to write a poem that will win her a coveted grant and navigate the emotional minefield created when her cheating ex shows up. However, while Charlie’s circumstances seem dire, the film and its lead actress handle them with an air of nonchalance.
Perhaps best known as the co-host of the Red Scare podcast, with this and last year’s Sunday Girl, Nekrasova is becoming the go-to actress to play the apathetic, selfish young woman in any indie. Here as there, Nekrasova’s greatest asset is her facial expressions. Charlie doesn’t quite scowl through life, but wears a look that, especially in this case, feels blandly amoral and it makes even watching her bike through Berlin while smoking seem comical. Charlie seems bored whether she’s reading one of her poems or posing sexily for her photographer ex, as if she’s one distraction away from completely abandoning about whatever she’s doing.
However, that’s in no way meant to suggest Nekrasova has limited range. When Charlie defends herself in court, it’s broad comedy. When she mercilessly critiques other poets’ work, we understand that she’s harsh but fair not just from Nekrasova’s straightforward delivery, but the way the other poets react. Charlie is certainly meant to be extreme, but she’s still essentially a real person.
That said, she’s also messier and more self-destructive than the average woman. Not only does she seem to have no qualms about sleeping with a man who’s already living with another woman, she doesn’t hesitate to steal the other woman’s shoes simply because she likes them. Charlie certainly understands what she does is wrong considering she doesn’t fess up to the theft when he confronts her later, but she also doesn’t seem to really care about what’s right or wrong.
Indeed, Charlie steals throughout the film, seemingly driven by no other impulse than pure want and while its a key aspect to her characterization, it’s also representative of the blasé amorality that motivates her. Charlie moves through life with no plan and no longterm goal, each action driven by what just happened or whatever whim strikes. She’s an anarchist on some level, but she’s also, as her roommate Remo (Johannes Frick) describes her at one point, a narcissist. The question–as he and therefore the film put it–is whether she’s also a sociopath capable of something truly heinous.
Softness of Bodies’ final scenes leave little doubt to the answer. As Charlie reads out her paean to consumerism that includes the film’s title, it seems clear that Blady is critiquing something through her actions. And while it would be easy to read the film as an indictment of image-obsessed, selfish millennials, it’s also equally possible that in this case, a cigar really is just a cigar. Maybe Charlie stands for a generation or maybe she’s just a crazy fictional character we’re supposed to both love and hate. Regardless how you ultimately feel about her, though, there is something thrilling in watching the havoc she wreaks.
Softness of Bodies is now streaming on Amazon Prime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj_aaYr5Ut0
