child abuse

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 2014)

If you want to see an exercise in child-abuse this it the movie for you. It starts with a mother who forces her child to follow into her exact footsteps and have the ballet career she never had (because she got pregnant!), which leads to the daughter torturing herself with starvation-diets and gruesome exercises in a futile attempt to please her mother. As so many abused children her total lack of 'self' makes her an easy pray for sexual predators and their manipulations. She sadly never manages to come into her own (though there is a short episode of lashing out by sleeping with a random boy and with a 'bad girl' friend). And eventually dies at the end of the movie, in a scene that seems to suggest this climax of unending psychological and physical brutality heaped onto a young woman is somehow 'artistic'