Lady Bird: A Hora de Voar (2017)★ 7.7/10

I dropped out of university six months after I got in. I hated every moment I spent studying Law. When I finally told my mum I wasn’t going to show up to my last final (I had failed the other two), she got very mad, she screamed at me and I just cried (I can’t stand up to my parents, even though I’m a grown ass woman) and then I called my grandma and went to live with her for two weeks. My mom didn’t talk to me for those two weeks I wasn’t there. I hated my mom when I was like 14-15 and going through the roughest patch in my depression, and then one day you just click and understand that life is shit and your mom does the best she can. I didn’t hate her when she screamed at me or even when she wouldn’t talk to me, how could I? She just thought I wasn’t being the best version of myself.

Mother-daughter relationships are so complicated that it’s rare to see them portrayed sincerely in movies. Even rarer to see them be executed so perfectly. This movie sold it to me in the first thrift store scene, when it seems like a fight that’s going to escalate and then the mom takes out a dress and the fight disappears just like that. It’s the truest portrayal of mother-daughter I’ve ever seen.

It’s also rare to see a film that ends where the protagonist wants. Most of the times we’d see that her mother was right all along, that she should’ve stayed in Sacramento because family is important, and that’s what it means to grow up, to realise that she knows what you actually wanted and needed. Sometimes moms are wrong. Sometimes you just gotta do what you want to do to find the best version of yourself.

It’s a film that feels as if it was made for me. And I’m glad I waited to see it. Now I’m working, I’m studying what I wanted to study, and my relationship with my mother finally seems like something sustainable. It’s a film that fills me with warmth because I went through that, and I made it to the other side.