Mike Mills
20th Century Women

When we watch a movie, we are never truly alone. With us are memories, doubts, unresolved situations. We project onto the story something that belongs to us, as if the screen becomes a mirror. In those moments, what we see speaks more about us than the film itself. 20th Century Women (2016) is one of those films that provoke this kind of reflection.

Mike Mills, already director of Beginners (2010), a partially autobiographical film that won an Oscar for Christopher Plummer, returns here to tell another personal story, set in 1979. Annette Bening, brilliant and often underrated, plays Dorothea, a 55-year-old single mother separated from her fifteen-year-old son Jamie not so much by conflict, but by an inevitable generational gap.

In an attempt to understand him, Dorothea relies on two young women: Abbie, a punk and feminist roommate, and Julie, Jamie's enigmatic best friend. Around them orbits William, the only adult man, a gentle but blurred presence. What emerges is a collective and imperfect sentimental education.

More than a coming-of-age story, for me, it is a film about the distance between parents and children: inevitable, even when there is love. Dorothea was born during Prohibition, loves Fred Astaire, crooners, unfiltered cigarettes, and a world that disappeared after World War II. Jamie lives in the frenzy of punk, the Talking Heads, the theatrical anger of a generation that doesn't know what it wants but knows what it rejects. Yet both seek contact, without truly succeeding.

The narration has an irregular pace, at times it stumbles, other times it shines, and there isn't a real final resolution. The film is blended by a gentle and persistent melancholy: for what we can't hold on to, for what we will never understand, and also for what we will become. In fact, besides highlighting the impossibility of understanding "the other," the setting of 20th Century Women suggests that after being Jamie—protagonists of our time—we will become Dorothea: more at ease with the past, less interested in the present, perhaps a bit scared of a future that will increasingly exclude us.

The beautiful soundtrack—from Bowie to Benny Goodman—intelligently and sensitively amplifies this clash between eras.