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| Jakob Lass's Tiger Girl (2017) shows us what happens when women get angry |
Watching women stop taking sh** and stand up against di**heads can be extremely satisfying, especially in a world where the differences that divide us can create a sense of overwhelming powerlessness. Jakob Lass's gritty
Tiger Girl (2017) immediately immerses you in a world where for young women, every moment of the day is laden with harassment and threat. The film follows Maggy (Maria-Victoria Dragus), aka Vanilla, as she fails her police exam and takes the next step toward having some kind of future, training as a security guard. Along the way, her encounters with both men and women are dispiriting, as she is mocked, harassed, and treated like garbage repeatedly.
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| Both Vanilla and the audience fall for Tiger's (Ella Rumpf's) charms |
In the midst of this bleak situation, Tiger (Ella Rumpf) appears, a young, rough female hoodlum who takes no crap and meets adversity with a vicious kick and a kind of violent glee. Someone blocks a parking space with her giant SUV? Knock off her side mirror so there is room. Threatened waiting for the metro? This scrappy young woman will take you on, even if it means she'll suffer some knocks in the process. Certainly, the violence both committed by and acted upon Tiger is upsetting, but that's what makes her tough, mischievous demanding of payback so thrilling; her limited code of ethics, and her manic energy, keeps the character from being too unlikeable.
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| The baseball bat is the catalyst for a whole bunch of mayhem |
After Vanilla's fateful encounter on a subway platform, the two start to hang out in earnest, two angry, disenfranchised women looking to have some rather violent fun. The development of their friendship feels both hyper-intense and desperately real. Their primary source of entertainment is to dress up in security uniforms, and pretend to enforce rules on the populace, wielding a small degree of authority in a world where they have little to none. The scene where they strip search a series of male customers at the local mall is both disturbing and decidedly naughty.
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| Vanilla (Maria-Victoria Dragus) starts to take her violence way, way too far |
Still, what starts out as some pranks against a culture that oppresses them, turns into a full-blown display of "ultra-violence," as Vanilla starts acting out well beyond her nighttime excursions, slugging people and bullying them just because she can. Her once absent confidence transforms into a strange narcissistic psychopathy, and her ability to feel empathy is completely replaced by a malicious contempt for everyone, including a couple of droogs she enlists along the way. In this maelstrom of female rage, even Tiger starts to distance herself from Vanilla and her extremes.
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| Vanilla and Tiger pose as mall security |
While the film's adrenaline-fueled scenes of action and rage certainly plunge the viewer into this grim world and drag her along from scene to scene, the repetition of often unmotivated violence gets to be a little tedious after a time. What begins as refreshing starts to feel rather pointless, and the film takes on an
A Clockwork Orange relentlessness.
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| The cops are always eager to assert their authority |
Yet, while Kubrick's film seems to have some really clear messages in its ultraviolent worldview,
Tiger Girl's takeaway is more unclear. Both young women are hungry to attain a power that is relatively absent in their lives (power that is economic, social, sexual). Vanilla's interest in becoming law enforcement, and then part of a security force, connects to a larger wish to gain control over her life
and wield authority over others. Yet the notion of "power corrupts" is taken to an extreme, as her loss of control becomes rather tragic. The film's ending also rings strange, as its message is not conclusive, but more a way of raising more questions of what the future might hold for these two angry citizens.
Tiger Girl is worth seeing for Ella Rumpf's portrayal of the charismatic Tiger, but overall, the film disappoints on some important levels.
