I’m no better than a man. I sat myself in front of Forbidden Fruits for eye candy, a catty story, and to re-up on a healthy serving of gender. From marketing alone, Meredith Alloway’s debut feature makes promises on all of these, and delivers on all but one. Regardless, remember that I told you so when our daughters start to double feature the fruits with Jennifer’s Body in fifteen years.
Pumpkin (Lola Tung) works in the last place you’d want to be employed. The bottom of the consumer barrel- the mall food court. Where you want to be is Free Eden, the boutique chain that employs the most provocative girls, all of whom are suspiciously named after fruits? The girls use their charm and a wink of witchcraft to finesse ridiculous profit margins for the store while leaving the social structure of the Dallas- area mall gagged with sex appeal. Costume design, hair, and makeup all stun, even inside a mall food court.
The Big Apple
Lili Reinhart leads the consumer-focused cult. Her character’s name is Apple, and she’s exactly the kind of perfect that many young women would be happy to ditch their own personalities for in order to get on her sidekick roster. Will she use her friends as glorified bellhops? Oh, yeah. The film opens with Apple tossing a hot latte that probably cost her nine bucks through the car window of a man twice her age, jackin’ it at 9AM…from a Stanley cup, mind you. She’s obviously a problem, but all women silently wish we could strut through the world with similar “Don’t fuck with me, loser. My shit don’t stink.” energy.
Here’s the thing, though; it does. Alloway and co-writer Lily Houghton focus on the real tragedy of girls shrinking themselves to conformity through the coven/cult thing going on in the break room. Not saying what unfolds in the third act is in your future if you do. But such crimes against your authentic self definitely have consequences. Just as fast as Pumpkin discovers how to seduce the fruits to let her in, her suspicions of their witchcraft are confirmed after mall hours. Now she’s got to ask herself how worth it this lifestyle really is (cue “How Soon Is Now?” from The Craft).
Know Your Fruits
Apple brings a soft, but volatile terror that Riverdale could never handle from Reinhart. The remaining Free Eden staff, Fig (Alexandra Shipp), and Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) are too easy to love. Women come in different flavors, if you didn’t know that already, so big clap for femme characters who are all different in motivation, aesthetic, and especially dialogue. The brilliance of campy girl gender is all over these lines, and the ensemble’s performances are witty on them. Even the small roles designed to set off the group dynamic are hilarious. It’s all ideal to recreate the mall rat social hierarchy that millennials are grateful to have escaped.
When Forbidden Fruits falls in her third act, it’s down the whole damn escalator. The film adds a new mystery; the curious case of ex-employee, Pickle (Emma Chamberlain), rushes through it, then completely abandons the dialogue-based murder mystery altogether in favor of a high-stakes death spree in less than 25 minutes. Aggressively switching up the focus with no lube to prep us for chaos? We had such a good thing going!
Is It Still Good Or…
The finale gargles too much new info for the credits to be rolling in any minute. I could’ve forgotten that an hour prior, I was writing down mic drops like “I know yesterday was wack, but it’s really not my fault because I Googled it and Mercury was in retrograde” to use against my own enemies if needed. The far-from-grand, Swiss cheese ending had me feeling everything but satisfied.
Forbidden Fruits is a hot girl sleepover movie that stuffs way too much in her tiny Juicy Couture purse, losing the viewer in the details and pace. Disappointing, definitely. It’s pre-Republican Katy Perry “I Kissed A Girl”; progressiveness, yet bimbo by choice, not origin. That’s too smart to not be a little evil, so remember, all girls are deserving of sisterhood. To borrow from 1995’s Gwen Stefani-, take the pink ribbon off your eyes and analyze your relationships before you find yourself cult-locked with a murder charge. You’ve had it up to here, and I hear you, but it’s not that serious.
