The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/author/tq24cornell-edu/)
Water or sex: which is more important? In Veit Helmer’s Absurdistan, the women are on one side of the barbed-wire fence while the men are on the other. It doesn’t take a star-reading babushka to figure out who chooses what.
Life is hard. Making money is hard. Being on your own is hard. Recently, these messages have been ingrained into our brains from every media outlet and from all our friends that suddenly decided to forgo a financial career and take a stab at the LSATs. Therefore, it is difficult to sit through another movie that reiterates how depressing life can be without monetary resources. No wonder people willingly gravitated towards the dazzling, though excessively impractical, Slumdog Millionaire this past year for a fantastical escape.
Students take pregnancy tests, hand over drugs and run from cops all in the hours before they trudge into class on the first day of school. These are not the typical scenarios that we see on television teen dramas nowadays. On Monday afternoon, Cornell alum and writer/director Trac Minh Vu ’97 presented a screening of his TV pilot Red Hook High, where students are as far away from the luxuries of the good life as they can get.
Who wouldn’t love to watch a movie about the sexual awakenings of 15-year-old girls, especially French girls that spend a good portion of the film frolicking in swimsuits (sometimes not even that) and kissing each other? Water Lilies may seem like the dream movie for every male pervert, but beneath the surface, this film is a frank coming of age study that is intimately relatable to the female viewer.