Alice in Wonderland is a cultural mainstay that provides many a framework for the struggles of a girl maturing into a woman. A girl goes to sleep one day, and finds that she’s facing a whole new world of strange and scary forces all out for their own survival. They have no time to be protective of a girl they don’t know and who barely even knows herself or her position within the world.
Such is Girl Asleep, a new and just long enough film that borrows liberally from Alice in Wonderland to inform that one moment when a teenage girl figures out that she needs to embrace her womanhood. Greta Driscoll (Bethany Whitmore) is about to celebrate her 15th birthday, but hasn’t yet embraced her maturity. She desperately clings to everything of her youth in the hopes of staying protected even as she becomes the target of various mean girls at school who have embraced their maturity (even if they aren’t actually mature) ahead of her. After an embarassment at her birthday party, Greta falls asleep and enters a wonderland where she has to fight her own vices against familiar figures from her life.
First time director Rosemary Myers adapts Matthew Whittet’s abbreviated stage play by embracing the staginess of the production. Set in the late 1970s, Myers embraces the bad hair, tacky fabric patterns and earth brown color scheme in a self-conscious imitation of the Wes Anderson school of filmmaking. Not only is Myers fetishizing 70s kitsch – from leisure suits to exercise bikes – she liberally borrows from Anderson’s fussy framing. Characters are isolated by color within sets of wood and wallpaper, section titles are printed on household objects, and outsized reaction shots are all contained within an artificial 1.33:1 aspect ratio that recalls the televisions of the era.
Flipping to the other side, Greta’s trip through wonderland seems to be set on a jewelbox stage full of trees that rise higher than the frame and people dressed up in furry low-rent costumes. It’s a cutesy endeavor that nonetheless possesses a bit of the menace Greta faced in the real world. Where the real life section shamelessly imitated Rushmore, the fantasy section shamelessly imitates Where The Wild Things Are, creating an hour with two distinct but separate visual styles.
Sure, much of Girl Asleep feels familiar and doesn’t say much of anything groundbreaking. But, it does everything it does so well. Even though it copies styles, it copies them with extraordinary skill. Even though the story is a hybrid of Heathers and Alice in Wonderland, the collision of these various influences creates a fresh and new experience. Girl Asleep is a viciously hilarious film that wildly entertains through its short and special run time.
