In Zaida Bergroth’s Miami, the meek Anna (Sonja Kuittinen) is reunited with her estranged sister, Angela (Krista Kosonen)—a club dancer in dutch with the mob—and the two come up with a plan to blackmail johns getting private hotel room dances to pay off Angela’s debt. Hmm, think it’ll all work out in the end? Despite terrific lead performances, this thing is unforgivably generic, its rote narrative dictating increasingly dumb decisions by the protagonists, with an inevitable punctuation of grim violence. There’s cookie-cutter low-light digital handheld and a couple of montages set to benign Europop. But without anything to say about these women exercising some newfound power or the economic and social systems that keep them struggling (there’s even a convenient subplot about a corrupt politician that would have been a perfect delivery device) this is just another girls on the run movie. Re-watch Thelma & Louise instead.
Published as part of Toronto International Film Festival 2017 | Dispatch 1.
