Both filmmaker Eva Riley and young talent Frankie Box make a bold, auspicious debut in this astutely observed story about a neglected teenager cast adrift in her small Brighton community.
With a title that as much echoes the validation awarded to athletes as it does the judgements that are bestowed upon young women, Perfect 10 studies the ways in which teenage gymnast Leigh (Box) performs for others in the hope of earning a new sense of belonging. With her mother gone and her father living with another woman, Leigh paces her now empty family home, stifling the need for human connection until Joe (Alfie Deegan) rolls in on a motorbike, chaotic, cocky and magnetic. Sharp-tongued, mercurial and short-tempered, Joe is a balm for Leigh’s loneliness, and she allows herself to be drawn further into the thrilling world of small-time theft while elsewhere her confidence at the gym wavers (a particularly cutting scene shows her peers mocking the threadbare kickers that peek through her new leotard).
Seserves to stand shoulder to shoulder alongside the work of Andrea Arnold.
Both Box and Deegan deliver brittle yet vulnerable performances and maintain a mesmerising rapport as their relationship spikes and falls. Their confident debuts showcase the continuing skill of casting director Lucy Pardee, whose eye for bright, unpolished talent has paid off in recent indie films like Andrea Arnold’s American Honey and the upcoming British indie Rocks.
Comparisons to Arnold’s work will be inevitable when watching Perfect 10; there are echoes of Fish Tank, especially in Steven Cameron Ferguson’s naturalistic, occasionally dazzling cinematography and the wounded core that sits beneath Leigh’s layers of deflection. Riley’s debut, however, deserves to stand shoulder to shoulder alongside Arnold’s work, as a film that doesn’t break ground in terms of narrative, but instead presents a tender character study that pokes deep into the corners of neglect and yet still manages to summon hope.