We’re definitely in it. The generation of girls who cackled watching The Craft and Mean Girls has finally grown up, and started to make their own art. We already got Slanted earlier this year, but Forbidden Fruits really feels like a film going after a new generation of women looking for movies about them. If The Summer I Turned Pretty was the pre-teen awakening, it would have been interesting of Meredith Alloway called her movie: The Fall I Turned Deadly, for a bit of winking synergy.
Forbidden Fruits is built around a mall in Texas, specifically Free Eden, an Express/Victoria’s Secret like place where every beautiful girl works at in the area. The store has a trio of star saleswomen: Fig (Alexandra Shipp), Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), and queen bee Apple (Lili Reinhart), the forbidden fruits all men want, and all women want to be. Needing a 4th fruit to complete their season of style, Auntie Anne’s like worker Pumpkin (Lola Tung) pops into their life, offering pretzels, but more importantly, a hot new female friend to initiate into their coven, er, friend group.
No Aaron Samuels like love story necessary for Forbidden Fruits. This movie is about the minefield friendship (especially female friendship) can be depending on which friends and which circumstances you choose to meet in. Pumpkin’s “meet cute” with the fruits is built around a mixture of desire for power and status, a bit of control, and a desire for normalcy, whatever that means for each of the group. But as time goes on, any niceties each of the ladies puts on to be in Eden has to be replaced by something real if this is a true friendship. As the script shows, there’s nothing altruistic underneath these relationships besides selling clothes, and spouting delicious, stupid funny idioms about self-care and female empowerment. This is a friendship built on a house of sand, destined to slowly come crumbling down. Eventually the real selves come out, and it is juicily NOT pretty. The final act gets a little dumpy and overly silly, but the road there is so much fun playing and counterplaying games with our quad to see who’s gonna blink first, and how everyone’s gonna respond.
All the success here goes to the 4 leading ladies, really willing Forbidden Fruits as best they can into the cult like status reserved for hallowed greats. Lili Reinhart goes for ice queen as Apple. She’s equally beautiful and chilling, holding it all in until the third act, where she unleashes all that buried feeling she hates leaving her body. Alexandra Shipp gets the most interesting character in my opinion; usually the healthiest character isn’t the side character, and Fig’s evolution feels the most natural and rewarding until it meets its hilarious silly backslide. Lola Tung ascends from TV star to movie star pretty adeptly. As Pumpkin, her motives are sorta hidden, but mostly clear if you’re locked in, and the screenplay grounds her nicely so even though she’s lowest on the power totem pole outwardly, its evident immediately that’s not the case as the story goes along. But everyone will hopefully remember Victoria Pedretti from this movie. She’s been the best parts of Netflix’s TV offerings for some time now, and here she finds a new, creative unholy merger of Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith. That level of daffy desperation for main character status means that even though she’s a pawn in the larger game, you likely won’t be able to take your eyes of Pedretti and what she does here, drawing some sort of chuckle/smirk from me for every weird line that comes out of her mouth.
Forbidden Fruits sadly does not quite hit Heathers status, but it’s a damn good try. Lola Tung is gonna be in our lives forevermore. Women led coming of age movies are back in an exciting way. And most importantly, the movie world will start casting Victoria Pedretti in more and more projects, winning best supporting actor eventually for some Mike Flanagan Stephen King Adaptation.