Much like its Mean Girls predecessor(s) and spiritual siblings, Forbidden Fruits is at its core a comedy of manners: the rituals of swift trauma bonding between twenty-somethings, the cultish devotion to a queen bee, the transmogrification of the wholesome girl next door. Add the witchy spellcraft and actors who’ve just tucked and rolled out of adolescence into their first rated-R movies and you’ve got a hit: it’s Sucker Punch and the Craft, Flower and whatever the hell that movie with Cary Elwes was, also Assassination Nation. Point being, there’s a lot going for this catty little barnstormer. At which point I’m supposed to recommend to you two high brow low brow reads that suggest this as a pop culture trend. First, Sophie Kemp’s much anticipated and wonderfully off-beat Paradise Logic, which doesn’t quite sketch the life of a typical 20 something woman so much as voice the alienated goblin voice inside us that strives to camouflage behind social scripting but doesn’t always succeed.
Second is Mona Awad’s very Forbidden Fruits-coded Bunny, which invents a Stepford wives-esque cult of trendy archetypes from MFA programs mostly so that we can try to peel off our own skin at the accurate assessments of navel-gazing artist academics.
So much of this movie is like watching a foreign film to me–none of the references land even though I know they’re incisive if you are familiar with mall culture of the early 2000s and today. There are a lot of sight gags that I can appreciate, including the opening sequence when we get to meet all the girls mute as they emote while the staff of the mall food court worship them. There are a number of moments when the whispers of a mall chorus pull off a joke, like the off-handed “spit in my face” apropos of nothing at one of girls’ antics. I also recognize that aside from Lili Reinhart, who blesses sets with divine gifts of vomit whenever she’s featured, I am supposed to be intrigued by the Summer I Felt Pretty’s Belly and model Emma Chamberlain making a Charli XCX-type crossover (Bella Thorne’s role in Assassination Nation)? That Alexandra Shipp means something significant to a particular set of girls who like Andrew Garfield and musical that went straight to streaming, which is also Victoria Pedretti’s entire back catalogue. The casting is absolutely flawless and the plot tumbles from its original premise quickly and unexpectedly until the end which is a bit of a mess, but still very pleasantly weird. My favorite line that I can’t get out of my head is one that Lili Reinhart growls at her underlings in the third act, when she urges them to “acknowledge” her custom cupcakes.
