Toxic review – stylishly blank look at fashion’s real victims | Movies

Lithuanian first-time director Saule Bliuvaite makes an actual impression with this impressively acted and elegantly composed characteristic set within the powerful suburbs of Kaunas the place teen women dream of escape by a global modelling profession. Bliuvaite and her cinematographer Vytautas Katkus contrive hanging tableaux and ambient setpieces, creating an emotional context for this drama: a world of alienation and determined want, but additionally resilient humour. It’s a disturbing essay in sexuality, poverty and sexual capital which jogged my memory a little bit of Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure and Isabella Eklöf’s Vacation in its candid, affectless evocation of the younger feminine physique, and its vulnerability to weight-loss exploitation. Bliuvaite’s fashion jogged my memory of the Austrians Ulrich Seidl and Jessica Hausner – the latter was by the way president of the jury which gave this movie high prize finally yr’s Locarno movie competition.Newcomer Vesta Matulyte performs Marija, a shy woman who walks with a slight limp attributable to a incapacity; she has to reside together with her grandma whereas her mum fixes her relationship issues. After being bullied at her new faculty, she stands as much as and at last befriends a lady who had tried to steal her denims within the swimming pool altering room. That is Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaite), and collectively these two reply to an advert for a “modelling faculty” audition which guarantees to ship profitable candidates on trend journeys to the far east and the US. Nevertheless they need to pay upfront for his or her photoshoots and different unspecified admin prices, and their mother and father should signal a contract allowing their daughters to work for nothing till the “debt” is paid off. It’s clearly abusive and exploitative on some degree, with the penniless women having to resort secretly to apparent measures to pay these preliminary charges; but it will not be any extra of a rip-off than the remainder of the supposedly reliable “modelling recruitment” enterprise.There are bleak, mordant touches within the reportage camerawork; we are sometimes positioned in longshot in relation to the motion, or generally immediately overhead, in order that we are able to savour this clean context. Marija wears a Marilyn Manson T-shirt (the director leaves it as much as us to ponder that superstar’s present associations) and Kristina’s amiable dad Sarunas (Giedrius Savickas) – who’s poignantly ready to assist his daughter get out of this gloomy place by any means vital – wears a “Queen Elizabeth II Relaxation In Peace” T-shirt: a really surreal contact. The reality is Marija and Kristina are hardly greater than youngsters, and to witness Kristina get a tongue piercing or swallow a tapeworm parasite for weight reduction (cheaper than Ozempic) is to witness some horrible hurt or self-harm.Periodically, Bliuvaite will present us the younger girls practising the catwalk slouch across the grim scrubland, sashaying 10 or 20 paces ahead, halting with a hip-jut, swivelling and sashaying again – a stylised choreography of coercion and unhappiness. It’s a really fashionable piece of labor. Poisonous is on Mubi from 25 July.