Who wouldn't want to be Lady Bird.
One of the first things Greta Gerwig wrote for her first film as a solo director, Ladybird, "It was the college scene where someone asks Lady Bird where she's from and she lies saying she's from San Francisco."
Nevertheless, Lady Bird, the protagonist is actually from Sacramento , the unknown capital of California, the city in the middle of an agricultural valley that is forgotten between Los Angeles , San Diego or, of course, San Francisco .
Haven't you ever seen yourself in that little fib? That tendency to say that you are from the biggest city and closest to the small provincial town in which you grew up.
Mother and daughter, a relationship as beautiful as it is complex.
Lady Bird lies because she is ashamed, because she knows that, in the collective imagination, San Francisco is better than Sacramento. Or so she thinks she is.
Lady Bird isn't even called Lady Bird, she's called Christine, but she hates her name and rechristens herself in an act of rock & roll and self-determination, of recognition of her identity.
She is also an act of teenage rebellion, another proof of rejection towards a reality that you consider, due to the ignorance of youth, inferior to what you deserve. And for that you blame those who have given you that space.
Lady Bird, in the last year of high school, seeing freedom closer and closer to her, she rebels against her parents, With whom, at 17, she does not have the best time, especially with her mother who refuses to give in to her whims.
Greta Gerwig has made history with Lady Bird.
And there is another of the moments in which it is impossible not to feel identified with this girl who she struggles between being different and fitting in with everyone. As it happened to all of us in those years in which, consciously or unconsciously, you were still finding yourself.
Those feelings that ranged from shame to love, from dependency to disobedience, the desire to abandon your parents, but needing them when the first lack of love attacked you; the desire to leave your house to start what will truly be your own life. Or so you think.
For a long time Lady Bird was called mothers and daughters because Greta Gerwig changes the classic romantic relationship of any teen movie, the idea of finding Prince Charming, the first great love, for the absorbing, complex and irreplaceable relationship between a teenage daughter and her mother.
Tell me more about adult life.
Those fights that made sense to you and in which your mother could only take a deep breath and blame the hormones. The nostalgia of the sweet and cheerful little girl that she has disappeared behind pink hair dye and eyeliner. The feeling of being misunderstood, that nobody understands everything you are going through, because your world seems to break into pieces at each new disappointment.
Time seems to be running out and not passing fast enough. It's a strange concept, you're in too much of a hurry to grow up, to get out of your Sacramento (or put the name of your city here) and, at the same time, you already feel too adult to demand to be taken seriously.
When you get out of there, arrive in your new city and you pass the stage of lying about your origin, you will realize that the first mistake was that: take yourself too seriously.