“The luckiest girl in the world” on Netflix: To watch or not to watch the drama with Mila Kunis that leads the rankings?

Although she seems to have finally put aside her past tragedies, journalist TifAni Fanelli (Mila Kunis) sees her personal world shaken when film director Aaaron Wickersham (Dalmar Abuzeid) knocks on her office door with a proposal: to participate in a documentary about the shooting she witnessed in 1999.

Intelligent, beautiful and -apparently- sure of herself, this senior editor of the magazine “La biblia de la mujer” has one goal: to make the big leap to the prestigious New York Times. And despite the fact that her boyfriend, the handsome Luke Harrison (Finn Wittrock), tries to dissuade her from abandoning her plan and accompanying him to start a new life in London, her final decision will not be easy.

So far we have described the initial idea of ​​“The luckiest girl in the world”, a film directed by Mike Barker, based on the bestseller of the same title published by Jessica Knoll in 2015. Premiering on Netflix, the almost two-hour-long film begins by introducing us to the somewhat superficial life of Fanelli in the midst of his wedding preparations. with her boyfriend.

Choosing a dress, choosing the font to be used on the invitations or selecting the songs to be played at the party will gradually become minor details, because as the minutes of the film progress, a parallel story will begin to take center stage. . The reason? Participating in the documentary implies digging into his past.

When we opened this note highlighting the personal tragedies of the protagonist, we did not fall even minimally into exaggeration. Today’s journalist used to be a teenager who experienced two traumatic events at Brentley High School: she was the victim of a gang rape and a witness to a shooting, one of those that tend to shake American public opinion from time to time, but that still do not seem enough to motivate a forceful change in the handling of weapons by civilians.

That the filmmakers of “The luckiest girl in the world” have chosen to assign the role of adolescent TifAni to the actress Chiara Aurelia is a success. Although in some spaces the interpretive level that Kunis shows in her part of the film has been highlighted, Aurelia is not far behind, managing to give life to a high school student who, somewhat dislocated from the world around her, ends up in a terrible situation. of danger in front of whom he believed his friends.

With Kunis as an adult and Aurelia as a teenager, we have almost the complete drawing of an audiovisual proposal with positive (the most) and negative (the least) aspects. In both stories we have common characters, such as Dina (Connie Britton), TifAni’s mother, a woman who seems more focused on pleasing the world than listening to what her daughter needs to tell her.

The opposite could be said of Andrew Larson (Scott McNairy), the teacher who found TifAni after suffering the sexual assault. Both in her stage at Brentley and when he meets her again in the adult version of her, this teacher pronounces some phrases (“The past never dies, it doesn’t even pass”) that are a tremendous blow of realism.

“The luckiest girl in the world” (by now everyone understands the intention of giving it that title) is a film that could fall apart from different points of view. First, of course, as a social film. The panic that the protagonist felt at her school over the possibility of denouncing or not those responsible for the rape she suffered is something that challenges anyone, and here Chiara Aurelia’s performance rises to a higher level. Likewise, the emotional impact that it means for a group of adolescents to see themselves pointed at by weapons in their classroom is tremendous. And here there is also a success from the direction of Mike Barker.

But this film is also a portrait of the American upper middle class. With the glamor of the Kardashians bombarding you at all hours and through any social network, the role of TifAni’s mother and future mother-in-law result in several key moments, because it presents us with a superficial society, unaware of the tragedies of others, but above all desperate to make you ‘turn the page’.

If up to this point we have mentioned the successes of the Netflix movie, the correct thing would also be to mention its shortcomings. Probably the most noticeable is TifAni’s voiceover, which initially appears to be mostly the sarcastic expression of a brilliant journalist, but gradually mutates to become just a reflection of dark memories. In itself, the resource is correct, but stretching it for almost two hours hurts the final result.

Along the same lines as the shortcomings of the film, we can point out the roles of Luke Harrison and Nell Rutherford (Justine Lupe). The first as TiFani’s boyfriend, a guy who is sometimes sympathetic to his girlfriend’s terrible past, but who quickly loses his temper and yells “crazy” at her in the middle of the street. On the other side, Nell is a friend who seems to only agree to TifAni’s requests. She at no point does she look like someone who will help her out of the hole she finds herself in.

Something diametrically opposite happens with interesting characters, but poorly or insufficiently exploited. From Arthur Finnerman (Thomas Barbusca), the school friend who demands TifAni “take revenge” on the rapists, to Dean Barton (Alex Barone), the villain of the plot. The feeling remains that -representing good and evil- his role ended up being reduced to the minimum expression of him.

Beyond this, “The luckiest girl in the world” complies. From his performances to the way he approaches very sensitive issues, but fundamentally because, although many of us suspect the end of the story just a few minutes after its start, few of us will dare to stop watching it until the end.

THE LUCKIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD / Netflix

Synopsis: A writer’s perfect life in New York begins to unravel when a true crime documentary forces her to confront her harrowing school history.

Cast: Mila Kunis, Finn Wittrock, Connie Britton, Jennifer Beals, Scott McNairy, Justine Lupe.

Script: Jessica Knoll

Address: Mike Barker.