She is confronted with that question at her workplace by the mysterious Ricki (Lily James), an intriguing young woman with an uneasy edge looking to deposit a surprisingly hefty sum of money. Rita shrugs it off with a throwaway remark about her middle-aged metabolism, while handling Ricki’s business. But Ricki isn’t talking about the weight women routinely pressure ourselves about. She’s played with a darkly enigmatic, unnerving quality by James in her finest work to date — a knowing, even domineering smile often curling around her lips. Her next question: “When was the last time you saw the sunset on a beach?”
Co-written by Noa Berman Herzberg, this is a deeply personal story for writer-director Nattiv, and he does unwavering justice to the shared universality of Rita’s womanly journey. Operating on two timelines that are edited with conviction and well-paced clarity by Sabine Hoffman and Yuval Orr, “The Liberation” introduces us to a Rita deeply caught in Ricki’s web at first, with her daughters Ella and Jo risking a long, perilous journey to rescue their mother from a commune somewhere in the woods.
One of the best actors working today, Coon essentially plays two different sides of Rita with astonishing range across these chronologies, portraying the past and the present of her character through distinctive markers. The domestic Rita is frazzled, hesitant, unsure of her place in the world. Dressed in muted florals and wearing a tranquil attitude on her sleeve, the commune Rita (now named Naia) is contrastingly at peace, yet alarmingly docile, eating a deficient diet of plants (sometimes of the hallucinatory kind), no longer smoking or pill-popping.
The film’s absorbing final act is when Nattiv switches gears towards a more conventionally nail-biting thriller, with a diabetic Jo being put in harm’s way by the commune — it would be up to her sister and mother to save her. It’s an elegantly gripping turn in a patient and graceful film that generously laments the pain of an unfulfilled woman.
