The Bitter Kitten Movie Club: "The Wonder" (2022)
Tom & Lorenzo’s Pop Style Opinionfest
Tom and Lorenzo dissect Sebastian Lelio's 'The Wonder' (2022), a period drama centered on a young girl in post-famine Ireland who claims to
Key takeaways
- The film avoids clichéd depictions of rural Ireland by focusing on emotional and psychological depth rather than national tropes.
Main topics
- Religious mania in historical context
- Female agency and bodily autonomy
Notable quotes
"It's not telling a story about the history of Ireland... It's telling a story about grief." – Tom
Conclusion
While 'The Wonder' is praised for its emotional restraint and psychological
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) We're Tom and Lorenzo. And this is the Bitter Kitten Movie Club. Hello, kittens. Welcome back to another edition of the BKMC, a supplemental edition of the PopStyle Opinion Fest podcast, where we take a look at one film per week and unpack everything we can unpack. And one thing I never managed to say at the start of this podcast every week is that these are spoiler-filled discussions. I mean, I kind of thought that would be... Understood because we're not more mostly not talking about current films if Speaker 1 (0:52) this is a supplement of a supplement of our review and then of course right Speaker 2 (0:57) right right, so Yes, these are very filled with spoilers, and we probably should say that at the start of every Speaker 2 (1:07) But the podcast anyway this week's film is the wonder from director Sebastian Lelio starring Florence Pugh and I picked this film Cold completely cold. I did not know interesting. Yeah, I didn't know much about it. I knew it was a period piece and I Did you know it was Ireland? No, I'm not even sure if I knew it was set in Ireland. Um... Amazing. So, yeah, I came into this completely cold and... You know, sometimes I want that. Sometimes I want to just, like, no preconceptions, let's go into this. And, in fact, I... There's more of this in the review of the film that's, you know, gonna be posted on our site today, but... As soon as the film was over... Because I had not done any research into anything about it. I turned to Lorenzo and I said, I don't know who the director is, but there's no way they're Irish. And Sebastiano Nelio is a Chilean director. That's not a... uh, criticism at all. In fact, one of the film's strengths, I think, is that it avoids a lot of the storytelling clichés of looking at Ireland, rural Ireland in the 19th century. And, uh, you know, it really doesn't get into any of that. There's no, like, fiddle music on the soundtrack or penny whistles or anything like that. And even... You know, and let me just say this. The reason I said I don't think this film was directed by an Irishman or an Irish director is because it deals with Ireland, rural Ireland, in the decade after the famine ended. And, you know, it's a story about a young girl who is starving herself. She has a religious eating disorder, as it were. Speaker 2 (3:04) And I did think it was odd in the beginning of the film. I was like, it's kind of weird that no one's talking about the famine. Like, here's a starving girl in rural Ireland and a million people have died of starvation in the last 20 years. Well, they do talk about it. They do. That's my... I was getting to that. I didn't... In the beginning, I was like, it's kind of weird that they're not talking about it. And then they did bring it up. Speaker 1 (3:26) And Speaker 2 (3:27) like I said, I... I actually wound up appreciating it in the end that the film was not concerned with Ireland as a country all that much because it's not telling a story about Ireland. It's telling a story about grief. It's telling a story about family secrets, about family dysfunction, about religious mania. But it's not telling you a story about the history of Ireland or England or the famine or the... the influence of the church on Ireland. It could have told you all of those stories because all of those elements are in it. It's a story about religious mania. There's an English nurse in an Irish village. a different director would have focused on those things. And I liked that this director did not focus on those things. Speaker 1 (4:12) Yeah, I agree. I think if he was an Irish director, it would have been very different. More melodramatic, I think. Very much so, Speaker 2 (4:19) yeah. Speaker 1 (4:20) But because that's the way things are. I mean, it's like when you get a Latin director to direct a story in Latin America or something. You're Speaker 2 (4:27) going Speaker 1 (4:27) to get that. You're going to get that, yeah. Same thing, a British director. You know, you get a French director. You get a little bit of the... you know the dna i mean that you know you can't avoid it so uh we talked about it's funny because i was watching the movie for the i watched this movie a long time ago and and the second time it was a completely different experience and i'll explain why but i was watching with you the second time and i was like wow this really looked like ireland and you said it didn't the thing is that it was shot in ireland i didn't Speaker 2 (4:57) no no no i i didn't say it didn't look like well This does come up in the review, that I think there are creative choices made in order to not fall into those cliches, and one of them, which I actually really appreciated, Speaker 1 (5:16) I Speaker 2 (5:18) think in the moment it came out, like I was criticizing them, that I said this didn't look like Ireland. It doesn't look like the cinematic depiction of Ireland, which is just rolling green hill. Right, right. If you go back and look at those scenes, it's all mud and brown grass. It is a... And in that sense, it is... it is dealing with the famine. It is depicting Ireland as this dried out country that is just not full of life at that moment. And it wasn't. So, no, that goes to my earlier point, was my initial observation was like, oh, this... it's really avoided a lot of the Irish stuff. And then when, by the time I got to the end of the film, I thought a, that that was a deliberate choice on the director's part and B that I completely agreed with it. Speaker 1 (6:05) Right. Because he was shot in, in Dublin and County Wicklow, I think, I guess that how you pronounce it. Um, anyway, cause I, I, I was watching it in the, in the beginning, I was looking at it and I was like, wow, this looks like Ireland to me. But anyway, um, I'm like I said, my experience was completely different. Um, uh, I've been very much obsessed with Scottish and Irish history lately. Been reading a lot about it, watching a lot of videos about it. So my experience this time was completely different. I missed the entire famine thing. Not entirely, but, you know, how deep it was in the movie. Speaker 2 (6:40) Right. Speaker 1 (6:42) I missed that completely the first time. This time it was clear in every frame. Because I think the whole thing about, you know, starvation. by choice and by force, you know. Right. It's there. Right. It's there. But very subtle. Subtle, but it's there the entire time. The shame, I thought it was so, in a way, beautiful. The way they talk about the shame of starving, the famine that the Irish people went through, you know. They were shamed