In outline, if not in technique, this darkly disquieting coming-of-age "chick flick" remotely recalls Antonioni's L'AVVENTURA (1960), with its defiantly unresolved story line.
Gena (Aesha Waks), a 16-year-old New Jersey girl, works the summer at a beauty salon. With her mother in a coma and her uncle only a marginal figure, Gena is more or less free to do as she pleases. She counts among her friends a number of adolescent rebels and teen punks. Among them is Jane
Freeman (Summer Phoenix), a chronic delinquent who's just run away from the latest in a series of foster homes, and brings Gena along on her shoplifting and car-stealing escapades. Jane fantasizes a rosy future with her idealized brother Sonny (Sam Rockwell), in truth an ex-con working for a hood
named Sugar (Dan Moran). Even Sonny has dismissed his sister as having no future, and after he rebuffs her, Jane agrees to do a "job" for Sugar. That's the last Gena sees of her. Asking after her friend, Gena meets with silence and dismissals, even from Caller (Kirk Acevedo), a street tough
obviously interested in Gena, whose gang now possesses Jane's backpack. Tracing the missing girl's footsteps, Gena finds Jane's jewelery in an apartment full of druggy lowlifes, and discovers that the evasive Sonny is actually Sugar's gay lover. Caller had listened with interest to stories of
wealthy clients at Gena's salon, and during her work shift the masked toughs try to hold the place up. Gena's defiance makes Caller hesitate long enough for a client to blind him with hair dye, and the raid fails.
Like its heroine, ARRESTING GENA walks on the wild side without actually getting hurt, in a narrative heavy with implied threat and latent violence in the jungle of modern urban adolescence. Outwardly, little seems to happen to Gena, but in the end she emerges from a moral (or amoral) obstacle
course with her sense of self and survival skills considerably sharpened. It's not lost on the heroine that nobody else seems to care about Jane's disappearance, not her brother, not even her very few friends. That Weyer herself leaves the mystery open-ended is an audacious move that may
nonetheless leave some viewers unsatisfied, mainly because Jane (well-portrayed by the actress-sister of the late River Phoenix) registers as a more broadly drawn and accessible character than Waks's somewhat passive Gena; Jane's presence truly is missed. Contrary to the title, Gena never gets
arrested--she only accompanies the others to the precinct, and her semi-complicity in the botched holdup apparently goes unremarked. The girl yields police attention to the hair-dye squirter Caroline (J. Smith-Cameron), a troubled older woman whom Gena has more or less adopted as a prop mother
figure. Caroline's humiliating brush with sexual harassment seems a bit extraneous even for a plot as loose as this; meanwhile, the wolfish lust that Caller and his motley posse have for Gena is handled with restraint, but feels no less powerful for it. Contemporary movies about directionless kids
running wild commonly push the envelope of outrage for sensation's sake (the highly touted KIDS was a good example). ARRESTING GENA's coy approach may not have earned it more attention, but it deserves at least as much respect. (Adult situations, substance abuse, profanity, violence.) leave a comment