Rent Girlfriend: film review with Jennifer Lawrence

frent girlfriend and the movie which must prove if Jennifer Lawrence is still bankable (successful, ed). And it must do so without being a film based on a comic book, let alone a true story. But as a wreck of the rom-com genre that fishes out of the tank of stuff like 40 year old virgin and also from The pupa and the nerd. But also from Porky’s and from The explosive woman. Just that here it’s the opposite, it’s not the scrawl that goes towards the elusive beauty – genre Woody Allen in Try again, Sam –, and the beautiful Uber driver going towards the awkward boy. Not for volunteering or fetishism, but because if it will transformed into a fool, his parents will reward the company with a car. Unforeseen sentimental consequences.

To be sure that Fiancée works, that is, that in the disaster of post-pandemic receipts some money also reaches her (and not just Tom Cruise)Jennifer is also a producer of this vintage film that plays between candor and irreverence. And in which at one point he shows himself in a full frontal action parallel to Viggo Mortensen’s naked struggle in Assassin’s Promise. Reminding everyone how she became the star of the 1910s: x-men, Hunger Gamesan Oscar, of course, and the conquest of the enviable position of reassuring likeable daredevil, sexy when necessary.

Not always a glorious decade. With Girlfriend for rent – and 5 other projects in progress including a film by Paolo Sorrentino – Jennifer in fact closes a period of discontinuous work that began after the blow (adding “on the teeth” would not be an exaggeration) of Mother!by the former Darren Aronofsky, presented at the 2017 Venice Film Festival and destroyed by critics and empty halls (instead a true prescient masterpiece).

Girlfriend for rentthe plot

The opening scene is that of a tow truck about to take a car away. It’s Maddie’s (Lawrence), waitress and Uber driver who doesn’t know how to make a decent income by exploiting the obnoxious tourists who haunt Montauk in the summer. Bribing the force removal guy is pointless, he’s an ex who ghosted.

Recovering a vehicle as soon as possible therefore becomes necessary, and vital, given that it is submerged in debt. The strange announcement of a wealthy couple (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick) who are anxious about their son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) comes in handyinsecure and lonely.

To unlock it to life they are looking for a girl from 20 to a maximum of 25 years oldMaddie has thirty and passes, but for the car as a gift if Percy will conquer safety and use of the world before university, one can lower the age or convince oneself to have experience. She has to have sex with it, she asks. Not really, however, the parents insist, she must attend him, but attend heavily, “clear?”. The first approach, in a kennel for traumatized animals, ends with pepper spray shot in Maddie’s face, rightly mistaken for a kidnapper.

They follow situations of various comedy, physical, resulting from the generation gap between Millennials and generation Z, between gadgets and grown-up things, e babysitters still around who are being displaced. And yet, between innocent sheep and nerdy candor, we don’t laugh much.

Least of all to the jokes related to the new contemporary sensibility: when a group of boys points smartphone cameras at Maddie to report her verbal abuse as an old boomera shiver runs down my spine at how we’ve reduced ourselves.

The meeting of two misfits

Instead, what works is all enclosed in No hard Feelingthe English title of the film: more than in its sexual double meaning in the literal meaning of “without hard feelings”. Namely the good substance of Girlfriend for rentwhich eases the friction between the two characters in a progressive reconciliation. And mutual discovery.

Maddie and Percy are both misfits: she can’t leave the city and the house where she grew up with her mother after her father abandoned her; she is annoying, often vulgar, dismissive; he more than spoiled is suffocated, mature and childish at the same time.

Also resourceful, able to improvise a serenade on the piano. One moment – ​​when he sings Maneater at the restaurant, that of Hall & Oates, not that of Nelly Furtado – which brings the film closer to the magical status of Big And When I grow up with Renato Pozzetto. To the intangibility of an impossible encounter, in which the adult looks at the youth and he sees missed opportunities and what it was like to live regardless of time.

In short, the director Gene Stupnitsky puts his heart into this story, a minimum of behavioral psychology. It’s the doses of every twist and turn he can’t handle, equal amounts of irony and drama that pay off Girlfriend for rent quite inert. Irreverent according to a quota scheme.

Without being memorable, especially in the Italian adaptation, Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman are perfect as polar oppositesthey would have deserved a place in the sites of famous phrases, they have won one in rom-com weird couple lists. Better than nothing.

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