Potter's latest film proceeds in a different way in terms of style and storytelling from her past work.
Orlando, for instance, featured actors talking straight into the camera. Potter's cross-cultural love story Yes had the actors delivering their lines in iambic pentameter. And Rage consisted entirely of dramatic monologues staged to look like interviews on a cellphone camera; the film was even released on the iPhone. Potter says she wrote the script of Ginger & Rosa with "accessibility" in mind. It was a deliberate strategy to avoid the filmmaking touches of her previous work.
"It's always a good principle to reinvent and to be prepared to throw away the things that you cling to as being your identity," she says. "And I don't just mean this in films; I mean this in life. We're not a set of habits. And I think sometimes to return to kind of first principles of pure intention, and be prepared to throw away your signature, if you like, can be incredibly liberating. It's quite terrifying, but very liberating, too. And in that way one finds new things to do."
A 'Kitchen-Sink Drama' Made New
This time the new thing to do turned out to be something old, says poet and critic Sophie Mayer, author of a book on Potter's films. Mayer says Ginger & Rosa draws on the realist style that swept onto British stage and screen productions, as well as literature and painting, in the period this film depicts.
"It seems very familiar to us now, but at the time it was a huge shock to depict people in their kitchens," Mayer says. "You know, you use the phrase 'kitchen sink drama' to dismiss things, but until that point, people hadn't been seen in their kitchens. There was no consciousness in film of that kind of domestic life."
There was also no consciousness of the politics of domestic life — the silent suffering for women such as Ginger's mother in the film. It's the silence of that generation of women in 1962 who could not know they were on the cusp of feminism's reawakening, and it was on Potter's mind as she wrote the script for Ginger & Rosa.
"When my mother died in 2010, I remembered — in a way, painfully — the struggles of her and the women of her generation, and [I] experienced them as ... silent partners in the beginning of the time of change in the '60s," Potter says. "Women, who, in many ways, were sacrificed for that change."
It's a sacrifice Potter acknowledges at the end of Ginger & Rosa with a dedication to her mother.