RIPE: L.A. Weekly, 5/19/96

One of the few unsigned festival features with anything approaching a buzz, RIPE is a strikingly original debut written and directed by Mo Ogrodnik and financed by upstart outfit C&P Capital (KIDS). Initially framed as a fairy tale (with nods to NIGHT OF THE HUNTER), the film erupts after sundown after two young twins, Rosie and Violet, race screeching through a ramshackle house, on the run from their rifle-toting father. The hunt ends not in blood, but with the girls swooning into a faint - perhaps affected, perhaps not. (Downstairs, Mom fixes dinner.) Fast forward some 10 years, and the girls, 15 and in full bloom, are rushing through the forest, leaving their parents behind for an imagined Kentucky pastoral. But first, there's a lull at a dusty military base, a place crawling with wolfish young men and much obvious trouble. A parable about the violence of love, sex and the nuclear family, RIPE works its deep charms most convincingly in the first half, when the real and the imaginary blur. Where Ogrodnik falters is in her decision to let a gun and its consequences finish the story for her, a lapse in imagination that's near epidemic when it comes to indie film.

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