Megan Griffiths’ latest film, Year of the Fox (check out my interview with Griffiths and screenwriter Eliza Flug here) is a coming-of-age drama set in 1997 Seattle and Aspen. On the cusp of high school graduation, a young woman (Sarah Jeffery, TV’s Descendants), adopted into the upper echelon, gets a disillusioning peek behind the curtain of adulthood. There, she finds selfishness, pettiness, a ring of predators and the people who protect them. Year of the Fox presents a complex tableau of American high society including gender politics, the commodification of young girls, patriarchal hypocrisy, and the price of privilege that only women incur.
If this sounds familiar, you might be living in the United States in the year 2025. As of this writing, the president is doing everything he can to prevent the release of a list of rich pedophiles, even though he’s “definitely not on it”. In fact, there isn’t even a list. Let’s focus on important things like the recipe for Coca-Cola! Twenty-eight years later, the only thing that’s really changed is the soundtrack. Systematic patriarchal exploitation is as American as apple pie.
As you might have guessed, Eliza Flug’s semi-autobiographical tale leans dark. But it’s not a suffocating darkness. That’s a tonal balance that Megan Griffiths has always deftly straddled in her myriad films about American womanhood (Eden, The Off Hours, Lucky Them, Sadie). Together, this dream team has crafted a weighty story about the ripples created when powerful men use their sovereignty to hurt women, without reproach, time and time again. Griffiths and Flug effectively inform the audience of the dirty deeds without miring us in the acts themselves. We don’t need to see the assaults, because it reverberates through the narrative: folded arms, hunched shoulders, a new bruise, a condom wrapper stuffed in a drawer, a knowing glance, a mysterious car dropping off a teenage girl in the wee hours, a man calling a seventeen-year-old girl, “an old soul.” It’s a shorthand that is familiar to at least 50% of the population. We know what all these things mean because we have all witnessed it or experienced it firsthand…
Effed by the Wind 