Nineteen-year-old Saoirse Ronan has thoughtfully created her onscreen image, firmly building her position within the film industry. At 13, she earned an Oscar nomination for Joe Wright’s Atonement, one of her first film roles ever. Since then, the young actress hasn’t slowed down for a second: within the last 12 months we’ve seen her in three films, all of which contain a fairytale/fantasy vibe that seems to suit Ronan’s energy well.
In the utterly horrible The Host she played a girl whose body is inhabited by two separate personalities (one of them belonging to an extraterrestrial intruder) that both have a handsome, ripped and dedicated admirer. She was also a teenage vampire in the melancholic and artfully twisted genre film Byzantium, in which she shared the screen with Gemma Arterton.
In her latest project, Kevin MacDonald’s How I Live Now, she plays Daisy, a very sensitive and fragile girl who finds herself in an unusual situation. The setting is the near future, and there’s a swelling military conflict. Not only does Daisy have to confront the outside crisis, like most teenagers she’s also fighting an ongoing battle with her own self .
She’s sent to England to wait out the worst in her aunt’s house. Suffering from a deficit of parental love and obsessed with hygiene, she’s thrown into a family that couldn’t be more different from what she knows. Her aunt is often absent, so the children are left alone to do what they please. It might be difficult to find things in their messy household, but the place is full of life and excitement, and her new housemates are very affectionate and supportive of each other. It also isn’t long until –of course! — the oldest, mysteriously attractive son, Edmond (George MacKay) awakens Daisy’s sensuality.
MacDonald’s apocalyptic vision of the future doesn’t include sophisticated technology, futuristic costumes, or creatures from another dimension. The world is as ordinary and mundane as today, just a tad later. Most of the action takes place in the English countryside, where the raging colors and textures of the vibrant landscape create a dramatically attractive space for blooming teenage romance and an omnipresent feeling of approaching danger. It’s a metaphor for childhood, a beautiful period of joy and bliss that’s destined to come to an end end for our protagonists. They just don’t know it yet.
Cinematographer Franz Lustig does a great job making the visuals attractive and also young and unpretentious. The images are romantic yet ascentic; sunlight suddenly hitting the lens, asymmetrical framing, and handheld camerawork accurately reflect a teenage perspective.
Thanks to Ronan and MacKay, the characters provoke an immediate emotional response. Like Elysium or The Road, MacDonald’s movie is also an indirect commentary on the ongoing degradation of the environment by harmful chemicals, armed conflicts or simply human greed. How I Live Now is likely to appeal to both teens and older viewers, and it thankfully doesn’t blindly follow formulas, but allows itself to drift and flow.
One thought on “Teen Romance Blooms In Post-Apocalyptic England In ‘How I Live Now’”
No. It is not a direct commentary on any of those. At best, it touches the topic of the effect of armed conflict on the environment only very peripherally ( passing mention of contaminated water. A single shot of sickly looking vegetables. The downed airplane wreckage messing up the forest, but little other effect) and does not touch on effects of chemicals or human greed( unless I missed that the war started over greed. The whole “war” is left very blurry. Also, I don’t see how you state that the story evades formulas. Let us see: Bitchy, self centered AMERICAN , teenaged girl. Check. Folksy, friendly, rural foreigners. Check.Distant parents. Check. Love at first sight. Check( at least for Edmund, despite the facts she an insufferable jerk, and his cousin). The military is bad and bad at it’s job. Check. In times of crisis, men ( at least younger men. not the protagonists) immediately become murderous or rapists( or both) Check. The lead, no matter how ill prepared, will sail through the crisis better than far more prepared characters. Check check( Daisy, a seemingly spoiled city girl, barely has mussed hair by the time she reaches the farm .Which she accomplished while dragging a 7 year old cross county. The boys, each of whom are shown to be capable, independent woodsman, don’t fare so well. Joe and Isiac die and Ed, though he makes it, is severely beaten and won’t speak. Also follows the boy gets girl-boy loses girl-boy gets girl back formula( though inverted). Lots of formula to go around here.