‘Forbidden Fruits’ resurrects the campy, it girl satire

Enter Pumpkin (Lola Tung), recently hired at the mall’s Auntie Anne’s send up Sister Salt, who approaches the trio with a wry confidence and some yummy pretzel bites. Like most in the vicinity, she seems to want to join the group’s ranks, but she also knows how to play it cool. More than that, she knows that her cheap culinary treats will entrance the group’s two junior members, who look to Apple for approval, but go behind her back when she shoots down Pumpkin’s sample tray. There are already cracks in the Fruits’ ranks, of which Pumpkin takes full advantage when she’s made a member and hired at Free Eden on a trial basis.

After hours, the group performs strange little rituals while invoking incantations about “juice press” and “thigh gaps,” before their fitting room confessionals to the spirit of Marilyn Monroe—who, they believe, was assassinated by the U.S. government for her uncontrollable femininity. Pumpkin, of course, doesn’t quite buy the act, and she’s not sure Fig and Cherry do either, but the opportunity for real sisterhood is enticing. She also has ulterior motives that take a long while to come to light, and don’t necessarily lead to the most interesting outcomes, but they do end up nestled alongside a surprisingly vicious and violent final act.

The dark comedy’s delights rest not only on nostalgia for this sort of filmmaking, but on recognizing the transformations and adjustments that might be necessary today. Despite being led by a quintessential mean girl, or it girl, from 20-something years ago, the group doesn’t want to be recognized as rich girls. That’s far too passé for the 2020s; class awareness has ironically become its own social currency. So, despite their coffee habits and bedazzled Stanley Cups, they concoct tragic backstories of poverty and broken homes that don’t quite gel with their chic lifestyles.

Lola Tung as Pumpkin in "Forbidden Fruits."

Courtesy of Sabrina Lantos

Is it all an act? That’s what Pumpkin hopes to suss out, offering Tung some wonderful duplicitousness, as she tries to wake Fig and Cherry up to Apple’s manipulations. The film’s careful construction allows for a first half that unravels in the vein of a campy farce, which is when it’s at its strongest, though it does lose some of its luster the longer it stretches on. Its more serious twists and turns, concerning Pumpkin’s background and real objectives, aren’t quite presenting with the same ironic verve, despite the movie taking on a few horror-comedy undertones.

However, there exists a shine that’s seldom dulled no matter what lesser turns the movie takes: its defiant, unapologetic desire to be itself. Despite its form being encased in the amber of a late ‘90s or early aughts teen comedy, it’s strikingly modern in its depiction of the self as a fragile construct. Which is by no means to suggest that it either is, or is trying to be, a work of great psychological complexity—but rather, that it fills its particular niche of retro-femininity with aplomb. The self-aware, bubblegum girly girl, à la Legally Blonde, practically went the way of the dinosaur in the late aughts and 2010s, and found itself replaced by broad, once-masculine power fantasies—the girl boss, and the “strong female protagonist” in genre fantasy—leaving little room for the fun temptations of flexing a look, or a vibe, and strutting down imaginary catwalks while being the center of attention.

Lili Reinhart, Victoria Pedretti, and Alexandra Shipp in "Forbidden Fruits."

Courtesy of Sabrina Lantos

These fantasies were subsequently relegated to a more queer underground, and have in some ways circled back to having a kind of punk rock sensibility. There’s a latent queerness to Forbidden Fruits that was also largely absent in its Gen X forebears (or at least, more latent), driven here by not only the performances, but by the characters’ dualities as corporate cogs by day and wicca-inspired clown shows by night. While it can be hard to take their whole thing entirely seriously, what’s harder to ignore is that these are young women in search of some kind of certainty of identity, whether this takes the form of rejecting patriarchal norms—and with them, sex and romance altogether, which the group’s junior members bristle against—or, in Apple’s case, embracing a gratifying viciousness and snappy demeanor.

The film may not sustain the magnetic energy of its first act—born in part of the realization that this is something of a genre resurrection—because its stage-like filmmaking doesn’t necessarily afford it new dimensions beyond what we initially see. However, as a fantasy of total selfishness in the guise of community, which is its own kind of toxic and delightful, it works in a wonderfully perverse way, for as long as it can.