Madeline’s Made­line

On a beach, a tur­tle is born. It erupts from its egg and crawls across the sand, des­per­ate to reach the ocean. Via the camera’s point of view, the view­er shares in the creature’s excit­ing and daunt­ing adven­ture. Already in these first images, the visu­al style of Josephine Decker’s third fea­ture, Madeline’s Made­line, is per­son­al and viva­cious, eas­i­ly match­ing the relent­less­ly curi­ous spir­it of its heroine.

Made­line (the aston­ish­ing Hele­na Howard) is a 16-year-old actress who immers­es her­self ful­ly in her rep­til­ian char­ac­ter. From the safe­ty and warmth of the small the­atre stage used by her class, she can reach the sea and feel the turtle’s sur­vival instinct in her bones. Act­ing is too often described sim­ply as the abil­i­ty to pre­tend – to be some­one else, to feel or want cer­tain things.

But Made­line is a won­der­ful exper­i­men­tal actor, not because she can pre­tend and lie, but due to her bound­less imag­i­na­tion and an abun­dance of empa­thy. Act­ing, when it’s good, is the abil­i­ty to open one­self up to all kinds of emo­tions, how­ev­er for­eign they might be to sub­jec­tive experience.

Madeline’s own life already has its fair share of strong emo­tions, how­ev­er, and as it is for the baby tur­tle, com­ing of age proves chal­leng­ing for this young woman. If act­ing under the tute­lage of Evan­ge­line (Mol­ly Park­er) pro­vides Made­line with an out­let for her intense and con­fus­ing emo­tions, her car­ing moth­er (Miran­da July) can’t seem to pro­vide the same solace. Men­tal health issues are in the air at home, where moments of ten­der­ness rapid­ly turn to ani­mos­i­ty between moth­er and daughter.

But Deck­er, her­self a trained actor, under­stands that although these bru­tal switch­es may be scary they are nev­er­the­less nat­ur­al. Madeline’s inabil­i­ty to take a step back from her con­flict­ing emo­tions makes her dif­fi­cult to approach but nev­er incom­pre­hen­si­ble: she is con­fused, but only human. Decker’s pro­found com­pas­sion enables her to por­tray scenes of ver­bal and even phys­i­cal vio­lence with both sen­si­tiv­i­ty and unflinch­ing realism.

It is with this same devo­tion to emo­tion­al truth that Deck­er paints the com­plex rela­tion­ship between Made­line and Evan­ge­line. What begins as a ful­fill­ing, almost cliché́d artis­tic exchange soon turns into a game of exploita­tion. The white, mater­nal teacher har­vests the mixed-race teen’s raw, real-life strug­gles to pow­er her own self-aggran­dis­ing art, leav­ing Made­line feel­ing dou­bly aban­doned – by both her real and adop­tive mothers.

A less hon­est and bold film­mak­er would have been sat­is­fied with pre­sent­ing art as the sure way to sal­va­tion and self-actu­al­i­sa­tion. But Deck­er, who worked in an exper­i­men­tal the­atre set­ting with her entire crew for sev­er­al months in prepa­ra­tion, under­stands that mak­ing art is as con­fus­ing as life itself, with poten­tial for mis­un­der­stand­ing and abuse of pow­er at every turn.

If Made­line wants to dis­cov­er her own Made­line – nei­ther her mother’s dif­fi­cult child, nor Evangeline’s piti­ful well of emo­tion – she will have to use her tal­ents on her­self, and wel­come her own dif­fi­cult emo­tions, instead of con­stant­ly run­ning away from them. She will have to act as herself.