For the Lithuanian girls on the verge of adulthood in Toxic, their physical appearances are a curse or a currency. Pinning their hopes on the local modelling school and an upcoming visit by international agency scouts as a way out of their dead-end industrial town, they are prepared to do whatever it takes to meet the exacting and unhealthy standards of beauty the industry has set. Saule Bliuvaite’s feature debut as a director, which premiered in the main competition at the Locarno Film Festival and screens at the Sarajevo Film Festival in the Kinoscope programme, is a wry, acerbic coming-of-ager that is empathetic in its depictions of youthful, misguided ambition but uncompromising in its critique of a scrupulous industry that thrives on systemic exploitation.
Marya (Vesta Matulyte), listless and lonely as a newcomer to the town and bullied because of her limp, hopes that the upcoming casting contest may change her fortunes, when her lanky frame and doll-like face put her as a frontrunner, despite her grungy misfit’s wardrobe and self-conscious, slouching demeanour. As initial enmity thaws into friendship with Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaite) after a physical altercation in the street over a pair of stolen jeans, the two embark on a punishing regimen to ready themselves for the day. This is no cliched or sanitised success story of caterpillar-to-butterfly makeovers. Bliuvaite has something darker and socio-politically damning in mind, as she reveals the bleaker side of globalisation for the newly capitalist Baltic states, and the emptiness of consumerism’s promises for underprivileged women.
There is not a lot to do for fun in the town, among its grey and grimy concrete facades and the alleys of dim bars where the underagers try to get served between their own impromptu, outdoor gatherings. Their yearning to leave is compounded by cramped living quarters, and homes where they feel less than welcome. Marya has been foisted upon her grandmother, as her mother has no space for her within a new relationship; Kristina is handed some banknotes by her father to make herself scarce when he wants privacy with his new girlfriend.
It is tempting to slip into sex work for the young women here, where hook-ups with their peers already feel objectifying and transactional, and money is desperately needed for costly modelling school extras like professional photo shoots and extreme slimming aids (a tapeworm sourced from the dark web via a third party is just one non-orthodox measure to deal with the pressure of having their thighs measured by the school mentor while they stand in their underwear.) Alternatives seem nowhere in evidence, still, there is a tough and game stoicism to these youngsters that appeals as a sort of indomitable resilience against the cruelty of an exclusivity imposed from power players above.
Striking compositions and surreal moments of beauty appear often from this everyday trap, due to impressive lensing by D.O.P. Vytautas Katkus, as when Marya is framed lying on a concrete jetty, her handbag as a pillow, shivering with cold against the pink clouds of dawn after a party, or dance segments that add a touch of absurdist surrealism. Poetry-tinged images contrast with others that foreground the grotesque and the town’s decidedly unglamorous realties, such as a tongue-piercing episode in a filthy public bathroom.
There are ample indications that the glamorous opportunities modelling in the metropolises of Japan or the States that they dream of are an illusion knowingly peddled by the school’s owners to line their own pockets, with a fate of entrapment and trafficking the more likely outcome. One young woman, now pregnant and back from New York, describes working at dicey hostessing parties where drinks are spiked; another’s family is saddled with debt when she is recalled. When an older man who lives a bus ride away books a “massage,” there is a sense this is not the only arrangement of the sort going on in a town where regarding one’s body as a money-making product, and repressing any discomfort or sense of violation that results, is normalised and passed on as the knowledge of initiation into getting by as an adult. Ultimately, swapping one milieu of exploitation for another seems the most the young women can hope for, in this bleak and incisive take on cultural imperialism within a European Union where not all are considered born equal, and everything is for sale.
Director, Screenwriter: Saule Bliuvaite
Editing: Igne Narbutaite
Cast: Vesta Matulyte, Ieva Rupeikaite, Giedrius Savickas, Vilma Raubaite, Egle Gabrenaite
Producer: Giedre Burokaite
Cinematographer: Vytautas Katkus
Music: Gediminas Jakubka
Sound: Julius Grigelionis
Production Design: Paulius Anicas
Production company: Akis bado
Sales: Bendita Film Sales
Venue: Sarajevo (Kinoscope)
In Lithuanian
99 minutes
