In a small town in Upstate New York, some time in the 1950s, teenage Maddy (Katie Cosini) was asleep in bed when she heard a rap at the window, and looked up to see her old friend Legs (Raven Adamson) who she let in, full of questions about why she was here since she knew she was supposed to be living with her grandmother about a hundred miles away - did she walk all that distance herself? Legs brushes off her inquiries, but makes sure to mention she was sick of being ordered around by her elderly relative, and Maddy offers her a place in her own house to stay while she gets her bearings. But Legs has a revolutionary fervour about her: she isn't going to submit to anybody's will...
Joyce Carol Oates' novel Foxfire has gathered a fair-sized following down the years, a tale of a girl gang in the fifties which was adapted into a rather lightweight movie starring Angelina Jolie in the nineties, largely softpedalling the political business in the process. Not so with director Laurent Cantet who wanted to keep all that in for a French/Canadian adaptation - but not a French-Canadian adaptation, everyone here spoke English albeit with a fair few Canadian accents - and depicted the gang involved, who call themselves Foxfire, as a force for social revolution which the decade was not ready to take on, urging them on to fresh heights of rebellion, first to stand up for themselves and later to survive.
It starts out fairly small time with Legs seeing one girl, Rita (Madeleine Bisson), victimised by various males, starting with the boy gang who see no problem with raping her, and then with the teacher who humiliates her in front of the class. Legs seems to be as much unreasonably disgusted that Rita allowed this to happen as she is angry that men can behave in this manner, so after admitting the girl to their coterie she starts to set out plans for getting their own back on the masculine hierarchy which orders the females around. Their opening gambit is to humiliate the teacher straight back, then before long the girls are painting their logo across the town along with pertinent slogans.
Not to mention acting as the enemy of dirty old men everywhere. Maddy is our narrator, seeing as how she was the one with the typewriter recording Foxfire's antics, including the method she got the typewriter, ganging up on the sleazy uncle who wanted to give her the machine in return for sexual favours. None of the men we see are painted in anything but broad strokes of obnoxiousness, all of them wish to keep the girls in their perceived place either by patronising them or more alarmingly, sexually assaulting them, so the audience is left in no doubt that the feminine truly needs to rise up against their oppressors, that was, the opposite gender. This is equated with socialism by the one man who seems respectful, an elderly Communist who Legs meets in the park and garners a number of useful ideas from.
But the film isn't content to show the girls as paragons of virtue in an unfair world, as we do understand their heart may be in the right place, but their strong wills are taking them to darker areas than they might have anticipated. In the second half, after the core six members have been in trouble with the law, they branch out from society to set up home in a commune, a tatty house somewhere in the forest, and increasing amounts of young ladies wish to join them, captivated by their ideology. Yet the way they get their funds is not working out in the menial jobs some get, so they set about stealing from older men who they lure with a promise of sex, only to give the dupes a rude awakening when they relieve them of the contents of their wallets, a plan sure to end in tears. That's not all that does, as internal rifts mean the gang begins to break up, suggesting all the ideals in the world won't help you if you cannot get on, and getting on with everyone is an impossibility - the girls have their prejudices too. Foxfire goes on a bit too long, but offers food for thought and is well presented.
