In Lithuania, the southernmost of the three Baltic states, an American tank was recently lost. He got stuck in a swamp, four soldiers could only be recovered dead. The Russian Federation is very close in Lithuania. Above all, the country occasionally brings the country into the news in Germany. According to Vilnius, there is a lively current of visitor, especially of people who mourn the Jewish life there who tried to wipe out the National Socialists, but in the area where the history of the film “Toxic” plays has never been a tourist. Unless someone is interested in electricity pylons, plumbers and post -sovjetic sadness. The girl Marija is also not voluntary here. She was deposited by her mother at this unpopular place at the grandmother. How long? “I don’t know. Certainly six months. It’s like that,” you hear the mother on the phone. She sounds perch, probably she has enough to create with her own life. Marija is big enough to get through more or less. External content activate physically, Marija is 177 centimeters tall. That is expressly said once. It is large enough to meet the criteria that apply to models. It is also thin enough. And she has one of those faces that you look into as if in a mystery. It is beautiful, but in a way that has something more provocative than something engaging. She also has a flaw that actually disqualifies her as a model. A woman who wants to bring young Lithuanians to the model industry does not start: “We will make sure that you will jump around and dance.” However, the woman is biased. Because it is your business branch to prepare as many girls as possible for a casting, in which the vast majority will be failed. They told about neglect and sexual exploitation of the director Saulė Bliuvaitė in 2024 with “Toxic” at the film festival in Locarno. You can immediately see why the film was noticed there and now also comes to the cinema in Germany. Bliuvaitė finds an appropriate form for a sensitive topic. She tells of neglect, sexual exploitation, also self -exploitation. She tells of the dangerous attribution of bodies for a market that is only indirectly present – with stabbetting like Japan or Korea, where young women are sent once they have been discovered. Or New York, where they are committed by party agencies who hope that they will be impressed by glamorous clubs and rich people so that they also give themselves up for sex. All of these perspectives are present, but at the same time are very far away for a girl of 13 years of age who is mocked in the changing room because of his swimsuit. In Kristina, which Marija takes away from jeans at the beginning, she finds a friend. Kristina is smaller, but she has what it takes to be a leader. She is ready to do almost everything to get a little forward. The eternal fear of only a few grams of overweight prompted them to take a drastic step. A well -known worries in the Darknet a tablet that should grow a tapeworm in its digestive tract. A parasite that catches up for everything that Kristina shouldn’t eat. It can also be stabbed a piercing on a public toilet. Among the young men who take a desirable look at the “virgins” Marija and Kristina, the girls are also considered “whores”. The misery of the transformation after the end of the communist regimes there were always films in the European cinema that were looking for an answer to the misery of transformation. Not least the landscapes that remained of the often large industrial projects have their own aesthetic charm. Saulė Bliuvaitė also has an eye for these aspects. Your film takes place in an area in which a power plant probably generates electricity for the whole country. A huge substation dominates the horizon, people live in quarters, which are often not much more than barracks. Nature is never far away, you can also guess an idyllic lithuania, people sit in front of the door with bare torso, the children strip through meadows and fields and sit by the water. Sean Baker has found a comparable atmosphere in Florida, for his film “The Florida Project” – there Disneyland was the “power plant”, which everything rose. And just like with Baker, to which Saulė Bliuvaitė is by no means epigonal, “toxic” is also about childhood. Kristina and Marija are children who obviously never really had time to be a child. They are confronted with the needs of a hardly any adorable life early on. Otherwise you can hardly see anyone working. Men devote themselves to the radiator gloss of cars. The fact that there is also prosperity in the area is only illuminating from a new house in front of Kristina and Marija-for a “massage” to which they were ordered, they would get money that could invest in a photo portfolio. Is it worth it? In 2011, the documentary “Girl Model” described the economy exactly with the example of Russia, of which “toxic” now also tells. But for Saulė Bliuvaitė, the decisive scene is the body of her actresses. She simply spells through exactly what it means when young women get an instrumental relationship with her body from all sides, to herself. Saulė Bliuvaitt, however, starts where modern Europe with its institutions and bureaucracies has not yet really arrived, while at the same time the seals through a global beauty market hit the most remote angles.
The dangerous attribution of young women
