A lot of us have the experience of revisiting a movie we loved when we were younger, only to discover that it’s not actually a very good movie. Not that this means we were wrong to love it, or even that we don’t still have affection for it now. Something about it connected with us when we first saw it, and that’s plenty important, even if we’ve gotten more sophisticated in our movie-watching and we understand now that things like having some idea of how to tell a coherent story are also important.
This is all to say to our younger listeners that Forbidden Fruits may well turn out to be one of these movies for you, not that you want to hear this from me, because I’m old. But it is a right mess, and rarely the good kind of mess. It also offers a kind of light transgression that might be attractive to some people who haven’t yet discovered what real transgression in movies looks like, and it seems to nod in the direction of some sort of social satire, even if it's pretty tough to be sure about what it’s actually satirizing.
The film kicks off with a trio of young women terrorizing a mall food court, by which I mean they walk in together side-by-side in a row and we immediately recognize they’re the dominant figures in the mall hierarchy because we’ve seen movies like Mean Girls before, an influence this movie doesn’t try to hide. A girl who works at the pretzel stand sort of shows up out of nowhere, staring at the three mean girls, and we instantly know something is up, largely because the movie has made no attempt at creating any kind of story for her before she appears. Although when we eventually find out what is going on, it feels so much like an afterthought that we wonder why anyone bothered. At any rate, it turns out the three girls work at a clothing store in the mall, they’re all named after fruits, and our pretzel girl, named Pumpkin, insinuates herself into their world, which also turns out to be a witch coven, maybe. They say it is.
We do get the intrigue and lies and exposed secrets we might expect from a movie like this, but the way it’s presented to us, it’s never clear exactly who’s doing what, or why, or whether it really matters. There’s no connective tissue between the scenes, subplots pop up and disappear, there’s a store manager we never see who seems to be important but we never understand why, and by the time we reach a few brief moments of gleeful mayhem toward the end, we wonder where this movie has been the whole time. It’s all less happy chaos, and more an apparent inability to tell a story in a way that makes a lick of sense.
But I do acknowledge very little of this will matter to a certain set of people, certainly not now, and maybe not later, either. There’s silliness, and acerbic behavior, and an acceptable, safe nastiness doesn’t go so far as to be off-putting. And, frankly, it’s a lot more fun to like something than not to like something, so it’s hard to be too upset about that.
Forbidden Fruits is in theaters.
