I come from a family of bodybuilders and have grown up with siblings who have consumed the egg yolks for breakfast and the cousins who received artificial tan before the competition. Even if you have to call me for the family’s weakest link, when it comes to building muscle, so feels in all the cases, the environments in the ”Pearl” of the familiar.
muscle builder Léa Pearl (Julia Föry) find themselves in an anonymous hotel and conference center where she and her satanic coach Al getting ready for the big bodybuildingtävlingen Heaven contest.
Behind the glamorous stage name hides Julia, a woman who abandoned her child in order to fully be able to focus on his career. When the six-year-old boy suddenly pops up in the reception area will her past life catch up with her.
unlike the male, exciting in that they challenge current body ideals and at the same time maintains some sort of turned up ultrafemininitet with the help of his stajling.
The kitsch aesthetics; platinablonderat hair, strassörhängen and bikini, is easy to dismiss as shallow, but this masks a lot of revanchism and emotional depth. For Pearl is bodybuildingen as much a way out of poverty as a way to challenge all kinds of expectations on her as a mother.
But in order to survive the cynical kroppsfabriken it is required that you learn dissociera from his own body. Otherwise it would be a quickie with the coach does not seem like the most reasonable way to burn 300 grams before weigh in.
”Pearl”. Photo: Triart
Looking through the Julia Förys, bodybuildaren who plays Pearl, Instagramflöde slipping character and the real person easily together. In the film, it has done well to work with tystnaderna and let the professional actors ‘ lines bounce against her fragile and powerful revelation in a way that perfectly captures the film’s strong dilemmas between body and emotion.
is a visual storyteller and then remove the camera from the narrative and hovering out in small musikvideoliknande scenes in a way reminiscent of how the director Paolo Sorrentino wont work.
A bodybuilder doing a choreographed dance in the backlight and the stylised images of the wrapped hotellkorridorer (reminiscent of the interiors from the crash in Sochi or any work of art by the artist Christo) captures the tävlingsvärldens emptiness in a striking way.
Just like when the museum of fine arts the Whitney museum in New York (1976), once upon a time literally stood bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger on the pedestal to recreate the ancient ideal also feels ”the Pearl”, with its many frequent close-ups of swollen muscles, extremely modern and archaic at the same time.
See more. Three other films about bodybuilding: ”Pumping iron ”(1977), ”Pumping iron II: The women (1985), ”Pain & gain” (2013).
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