This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Here’s what happens in this movie. Note that the words panda and sexuality are used interchangeably.
A perfectionist girl Mei Mei who is terrified of losing her helicopter mother’s approval starts having sexual fantasies. She’s told that the women in her family are cursed and must hide away their sexuality and have a kind of female circumcision ritual to remove their pleasure and keep them in line. In the meantime, the kids at school are super into her new panda…
Nope nope nope. One star for Sally Hawkins professing to Diana that she is in love with her, one for K-Stew looking pretty when she cries, but this was nearly unwatchable. I didn’t see Diana at all in this film. The lead performance was completely annoying. Every line was whispered with the exact same inflection. Now I’m going to rewatch the scene from the Crown where that Diana, who captures her pain and her sparkle so much better, dances to Uptown Girl.
After seeing a very interesting clip of Christina Ricci talking about how you can’t take someone’s dignity away from them and then expect them to behave in a dignified way, I had some hope that a film where the main female character spends the majority of the runtime in her underwear chained to a radiator (for her own good...) might have something nuanced to say about the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse. Yeah, not so much. There were some stand-out…
One good thing I can say about this movie is that I don’t feel as bad now about not going on vacation since the pandemic started
