Fitting In

 For the first ten minutes of this new film by writer/director Molly McGlynn I thought: "Wow! This film is amazing. So clever and well written!" Fitting In tailed off after that but is still a thought-provoking watch. 

Lindy is a teenager who has never had her period. Her mother Rita is concerned and anxious. Lindy has friends, runs track and is seeing a hunky guy. Her mother has her own issues that are so quickly established, you might miss the fact she has had cancer treatment. Later this will come up again. 

But then Lindy discovers she has a medical condition which explains her lack of periods. She actually has no uterus and what the gyno calls "a vaginal dimple". The medical terminology is quite eye-opening and the film is very good at putting you right in the middle of Lindy's consultations with an array of male medical consultants who do nothing to put her at ease or make her feel good about her body. She feels obligated to try stretching her vagina with a dilator so that she might experience sex as she sees it, i.e. penis in vagina. Nobody seems to want to suggest there are other ways of having sex although there is an entanglement with a non-binary character that promises more than it delivers. 

So, the film zooms from a breezy family comedy drama right into an intense healthcare journey which means jarring tonal shifts. 

I wish we had seen a lot more of Lindy's interactions with her best friend Viv, rather than her repetitive meetings with her boyfriend Adam and her arguments with Rita. A lot of scenes end with Lindy running out of rooms and it gets a bit tiresome. She has an array of suitors she treats badly and she also ignores Viv for most of the film. As a result, Lindy becomes more and more isolated and unhappy. 

But lessons are learned and toward the end there is a rather on the nose scene in which Rita shows her daughter her own surgical scar that leaves the viewer thinking Eh? Surely, more time could have been spent understanding the mother's POV rather than shoehorning it in at the end. I also did not like the way the film seemed to let Lindy off the hook for her own obnoxious behaviour, particularly toward a guy she used for sex. 

Kids, eh?

Trailer