Now and Then

Now and Then; Drama, USA, 1995; D: Lesli Linka Glatter, S: Christina Ricci, Gabby Hoffmann, Thora Birch, Ashleigh Aston Moore, Demi Moore, Melanie Griffith, Rosie O'Donnell, Rita Wilson, Cloris Leachman, Bonnie Hunt, Janeane Garofalo

Four friends - Chrissy, Samantha, Roberta and Teeny - meet again after they haven't seen each other for 20 years. Now, as grown women, they remember their childhood from the 70s: Chrissy was fat and her mother tried to explain intercourse to her with the help of flowers. Samantha was sad because her parents divorced. Roberta was angry because her breasts started to grow. Teeny wanted to become an actress. They argued with boys, tried to talk with ghosts on the graveyard and got into trouble. Back in the present, Chrissy gives birth to a baby.

"Now and Then" is an acceptable, solid melodramatic lemonade exclusively to a few charming ideas and excellent performances from Christina Ricci and Thora Birch. The story deals with a few serious emotional issues during adolescence, but instead of a delicate tone the mood is wrecked with tasteless grotesque: what was the purpose of the scene where a bird is defecating and it's feces fall on Chrissy's hair? What the point of the scene where Teeny shows how she fills her bra with Vanilla flavoured pudding? Still, despite many discrepancies, the film still has a few amusing scenes, like the one where the girls mischievously steal the clothes of the boys who were swimming in a lake, so they start chasing them naked causing them to run away screaming. The connection of the past story of 4 friends in childhood and the present story of them in their mature age (played by Moore, Griffith, Wilson and O'Donnell) is thin while many characters were underused: for instance, even though her part as voodoo waitress had potentials, Janeane Garofalo got to appear only two times in the entire film!

Grade:+