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If you missed the start: While she has just taken her family to a suburban lodge in a large Australian city, Greta, a 14-year-old teenager who is reserved and lonely, tries – with some difficulty – Friends in his new college. It is without counting on his parents who decide to organize against his will a party for his fifteenth birthday …

For several years working together at the Windmill Theater in Adelaide, Southern Australia, director Rosemary Myers, set designer Jonathon Oxlade and screenwriter Matthew Whittet have built a singular, teenage and dream-like theatrical universe. They adapt a series of famous initiatory tales, from Pinocchio to the Great Wicked Wolf, through the Wizard of Oz. With Fantastic Birthday, presented at the Berlin Film Festival and just rewarded with Australian critics’ best film of the year, they signed their first feature film in six hands.

Coming of age movie

With Fantastic Birthday, Rosemary Myers transposes her world nicely shifted from the stage to the screen and delivers a teenage fantasy about the fear of entering adulthood. At the heart of a delightfully retro (not to say nasty) universe of kitschy interior decoration, garish outfits and unlikely hairstyles, there is Greta (Bethany Whitmore), an introverted girl, who arrives in a new college in the suburbs. ‘a big city. As soon as she arrived, she met Elliott, a looser who was as intrusive as he was talkative, and was particularly enthusiastic about anything and everything (the young Harrison Feldman who made a particularly promising film debut here).
Around this enchanting duo gravitates a series of secondary characters completely crazy that the director depicts with as much irony as affection. In particular, the three little girls of the college (of which two twins rather impressive in their size) to which Greta refuses his friendship and who will make him pay.

A careful staging

Diverting the clichés of the teenage movies with a lot of malice, Fantastic Birthday takes the party, to emphasize the originality of its atmosphere, a staging particularly careful which is not without thinking of that of the films of Wes Anderson: Perfectly symmetrical frames, front field-counter-field, assured tracking. Not to mention these absurd sketches that take place in the background and come bring an additional degree of humor to the film. There are so many preconceived notions of staging and imaging, which prove that the three creators knew how to appropriate a language that was not originally theirs, and through which they orchestrated a metaphorical universe Well to them.

With this narrative halfway between comedy and tale, the three comrades elegantly succeed in their passage from the theater to the cinema and signed a first film free and surprising, placed under the auspices of Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze which they claim.

By Thomas Lapointe

Originally appeared on Pop Up

What a freedom in this first film! The strength of the Australian Rosemary Myers is expressed in her choice not to be trapped in any genre, but to swing easily from the registry of the vintage comedy to that of the fantastic film, passing by the tale for (big) children. “Fantastic Birthday” is the story of a teenager who refuses to celebrate her fifteenth birthday. It all begins with the arrival of the shy Greta in a new college where, far from attracting the friendship of the famous “popular pupils”, she disguises, as a friend, a kid in shorts tartignolle. Alas! Her ridiculous parents are keen to organize a big kitsch party in her honor, where she can invite all friends … she does not! Then the teenager appeals to his imagination. And suddenly, while we think we are installed in a comedy gentillette, arise on the other side of the garden monsters strangely attified. These are the ghostly duplicates of family members, but it is also the representation of the fears of childhood when it comes to begin the transition to adulthood. The brio of the haircuts owes something to John Waters’ “Hairspray”, the disturbing strangeness of the night evokes David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”, and the intelligence of cutting Wes Anderson’s films. However, if Rosemary Myers’s story is profoundly original, it is because the director comes to us from the theater and the musical, from where she brings back lights, songs, choreographies and a great, very delightful grand- guignoleque side. When the cinema astonishes, it is won.

Welcome to a funny and barred cinematographic tale. Fantastic Birthday, a beautiful first movie in theaters Wednesday, March 22.

Greta is soon 15, which is null, has just arrived in a new college, which is also null, and must undergo a birthday party organized against his will by his embarrassing mother, which is even worse. And if Greta went to take refuge in the little imaginary world of her childhood?

With Fantastic Birthday, we plunge into the hell of adolescence, its obstacles, here in the form of malefic triplets made up in the Paint-Ball, and its allies, here a nerd reddish enough perfect.

But we are not in American Pie and his heavy humor, nor in Larry Clark and his sensual spleen. With her first film, Australian director Rosemary Myers ventures into absurd humor, often cold, supported by an ultra cool soundtrack and well-sized characters.

Decor 70s, carefully composed plans … Film lovers will recognize the influence of the licked and pictorial style of Wes Anderson, with this same occasional tendency to stifle his intrigue on layers of pop varnish.

On the universe side, one falls to Lewis Carroll with an intrusion of the fantastic, metaphor of this complicated changeover between the childhood that leaves and the adulthood that threatens. The atmosphere of nightmare sins a little for lack of budget and by the impression of déjà-vu, but we came out of this refreshing fable all happy and (almost) nostalgic high school. It’s strong.

Fantastic Birthday by Rosemary Myers with Bethany Whitmore, Harrison Feldman, Matthew Whittet, Amber McMahon and Eamon Farren.

By Pauline Grand d’Esnon

Originally appeared on Neon

Presented in international competition at the Strange Festival last September, Girl Asleep became Fantastic Birthday for her release in the French cinemas. The film is one of those few chosen to benefit from a theatrical release (or a direct-to-video release like Détour or the excellent Sam Was Here – renamed Nemesis for the occasion) Aided by UFO Distribution. First feature film by Rosemary Myers, Fantastic Birthday is in fact the adaptation of the play she has herself staged: from the boards to the screen, the director surrounded herself with regular members of her troupe and New faces … A huge family celebration, both in fiction and in reality! Fantastic Birthday plays with the world of tales and fantasy to lead her young lead character, Greta (Bethany Whitmore), just fifteen years old, to know who she really is. Can we still take a new look at adolescence, the subject of the cinema? Yes.

Greta Driscoll, an introverted girl, is about to reach the age of 15. The only shadow on the board: she does not want to leave the cozy and reassuring world of childhood, a bubble in which she locks herself up with her only friend in the school, Elliott. When her parents announce the organization of a big party for her birthday, she is panic-stricken. In the great evening, she will switch to a parallel universe a little scary and completely absurd in which she will have to face her fears to be able to find and approach otherwise this new era.

The Sleeping Teen

Do we need to remember how traumatic a move is for young children? You only have to remember the vice-versa scenario to find out. Moving is leaving behind the world we know, its comfort zone. Greta understood that. When she arrives in her new school, the girl finds herself considerably alone, motionless on a bench, staring into space – or turning towards the spectator, seeming to say, “Pity, get me out of there.” Behind her, life swarms. An incredibly millimeter basketball game, the mascot of the school making his round … And next door, Elliott, who makes an attempt to approach. The first scene of Fantastic Birthday is a perfect condensed of all its spirit, as much scenario as aesthetic: the 4: 3 format encloses a little more Greta in the middle of the unknown, while the shimmering colors of the costumes and appearance Voluntarily vintage image remind the Moonrise Kingdom of Wes Anderson …

Fantastic Birthday perfectly demonstrates what it means to be a teenager. The relationship between Greta and Elliott stems from this perpetual fear (or envy, or both) of seeing a beautiful friendship transform into a loving relationship. At fifteen, bodies change and characters assert themselves. There are those who fall into the ranks and are among the popular pupils, and those few who are sometimes seen mistreated. “Well, if we annoyed the little news,” said the most intolerable triplets that had been seen in a moment. Coordinated, sly, unforgiving, these are similar to a cerbera … and this choice is far from trivial!

Find your way

What good does it want to obey the conventions if it is not to be who one really is? Greta feels even foreign to her family: her very extravagant parents seem straight out of a Gym Tonic commercial, while her older sister lives her youthful love (with French Kiss and Tutti Quanti). Its only reference, it is always this camera look, as in the first scene. It is the will to break the fourth wall to penetrate into another world: the dark forest beyond his house … ultimately to leave the childhood in which she delights. There is no shortage of references: Alice in the Land of Wonders, Queen of Snows … The tales of your childhood give rise to this imaginary fantasy, and especially didactic.

This is where Fantastic Birthday finds all the interest of its title. An initiatory journey in the heart of these woods where strange creatures, witches and apparitions mingle that Greta will have to face to learn more about herself and

Conclusion: Rosemary Myers skillfully avoids the pitfalls of the filmed theater and makes Fantastic Birthday an unidentified film object. From Wes Anderson to Michel Gondry, pictorial references mingle with the movement of the fairy tale to deliver a coming of age movie of the most beautiful effect.

After being acclaimed at the film festivals of Adelaide, Berlin and Seattle, Fantastic Birthday is about to seduce France

Aged 14, Greta Driscoll (Bethany Whitmore) is more interested in plastic horses and origamis than in social relationships. Aged 14, Greta is only a child. But on the occasion of her birthday party, she finds herself irrepressibly attracted by the forest that extends beyond her garden , a symbol barely hidden from adolescence. Greta must grow.

Although Fantastic Birthday is the first film by Rosemary Myers, no amateurism on her part is to be deplored. Although decided to go up the current rather than follow it, she chose to break the mold of conventional filmic conventions in the foreground, thus taking the opposite of the character of Greta.

With his tone offbeat but strangely so right, Myers fell in line with Wes Anderson … but in 4: 3! Thanks to a theatrical staging that avoids, by some magic trick, the pitfall of the filmed theater , it connects the Surrealist dialogues and the camera faces with as much subtlety as the pieces of the set tell the spectators the passing time, Like so many curtains.

Fantastic Birthday could easily enter the category of coming of age movies , but this first movie is much more. Unveiling a whole realm of possibilities , it certainly puts in scene a little girl learning slowly but surely to become an independent young woman, but it also skillfully emphasizes that it is not because one learns to become an adult that one does not Can not remain a child. As Alice dives her head first into the White Rabbit’s terrier, Greta plays the doll with her dreams with almost as much delight as one has to watch her do.

Special mention to Eamon Farren, who puts Benoît Tremet, a pseudo French singer at the Dutronc with a Tourette syndrome French-French a bit cliché but how hilarious!

By Jessica Saval