Sophie Jones, when grief and hormones collide
The movie begins with a sixteen-year-old, Sophie Jones (Jessica Barr), looking at the wood box she’s holding. The box means a lot to her and she’s trying to connect to what’s inside of it. We find out that Shopie just lost her mother and her grieving is quickly ignored by her family members, who are also grieving the death.
Teenage years are hard: our body is changing, our mind is shaping and the world seems like it’s against us. Our protagonist is dealing with that, and she also has to deal with the fact that her mother is gone, and even if we don’t get to know the type of relationship they had, we know that Sophie is in pain and she doesn’t know how to process it. Many things are going on inside her head and apparently, there isn’t a person who can offer the help and attention she needs.
Sophie starts experimenting with boys, partying, and her sexuality to distract her body from the grieve she feels. As soon as she starts feeling sad, she goes to the nearest person interested in her, without considering their feelings or even her feelings. She just needs something to distract her from her spirals. This will soon weigh on her and her close relationships.
In recent years we have gotten more and more relatable coming-of-age stories than the ones starring almost 30-years-old actors with hegemonic beauty and their plots revolving around a love triangle, deciding who’s more popular than who or the “cool guy” falling in love with the “not-like-the-other-girls girl”. Stories that didn’t have a sense of what being a teenager is about and didn’t give their characters a dimension. Movies that made us wonder when we had the same age those characters were supposed to have, why we didn’t look like them or why our lives weren’t so interesting. On the other hand, Sophie Jones is one of the most realistic portrayals of a teenager, which comes as no surprise because it is inspired by true events.
Both the director — Jessie Barr — and the lead actress lost a parent at the age of sixteen due to cancer. They are cousins, and although they grew up separated considering the age gap and the distance, an early draft of the script sent by the youngest one made the older realize how much of their lives and experiences were mirrored to each other, not just the name given after their great-grandmother. They both co-wrote Sophie Jones and that’s why it feels so authentic. Sophie Jones is a story that says to teenage people that are living through the same that the movie is there for them, that there’s a place where they can feel understood.
Not only the story feels authentic, but also the characters, the awkwardness in the conversations — whoever says the opposite doesn’t remember how they spoke when they were sixteen-year-old — , and the situations Sophie is in.
If Sophie Jones is a love story, it refers to a self-love one, but not the way you would expect it to be. The self-discovery the protagonist goes through is subtle and the simplicity is part of its charm.
The movie competed in film festivals such as Mar del Plata (Argentina) and Deauville Film Festival (France) in 2020 and it will release in selected theaters and VOD digital platforms on March 2nd. If you have enjoyed stories like Lady Bird (dir. Greta Gerwig), Eighth Grade (dir. Bo Burnham), or The Edge of Seventeen (dir. Kelly Fremon Craig) you’re going to like Sophie Jones.
This is a translation from this review published in Spanish.