09 March 2017 // Sanne Schrijver //Amersfoort
//AMERICAN HONEY
Andrea Arnold’s road movie "American Honey" is sometimes drowsy, sometimes hyperactive. It enters your senses fully. You follow Star, played by Sasha Lane, she is a poor teenager with nothing to lose who joins a travelling gang roaming the country selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door, living in shared motel rooms, partying, drinking, fighting, playing loud music, and making extra money in each town. The cast is extraordinary: pretty and unpretty, with the hard mask-like blank of youth, guys with powerful bodies, scribbled on with tattoos. Star falls in love with the crew’s top salesman, Jake (Shia LaBeouf), to the simmering rage of Jake’s girlfriend, queen-bee crew manager Krystal, played by Riley Keough. American Honey is a movie in search of an ending and in search of a meaning. But the search is the point. And Arnold’s ambition and reach are really exciting: the way she immerses you in the mood and the moment, letting her characters drift to the edge of chaos, capable of investing the least little thing with poetry.