FILM-AUTHORITY.COM: Empire Waist
September 24, 2024
‘…Empire Waist takes its name from a flattering cut, but it’s incisive in depicting the various traps and fissures that exist for girls in the modern school environment…a winning, yet thoughtful story of dressing for success….’
Let’s get body positive with writer and director Claire Ayoub’s dramedy Empire Waist, which deals with the age-old topic of dressmaking and haute couture/fashion but in a very modern way. It’s a Mean Girls-level story of schoolgirls overcoming bullying, but also finding friendship, looking out for one another, and learning to love yourself. It’s a PG-13 film, so the intention is to make something teens can watch with their families, or together. It’s bright, colourful, features emotional highs and lows, and some genuinely amazing-looking clothes; what’s not to like?
Lenore Miller (Mia Kaplan) is a plus-size teen who lacks confidence in herself socially; she sports an all-black ‘grief tracksuit’ as she walks the corridors of her school. Miller’s dad Mark (Rainn Wilson) has a bent towards creative design, but although his agency begins and ends with screen-printing funny slogans on T-Shirts in the basement of the family house, he’s trained his daughter to make dresses for her paper dolls, and the one thing that Lenore is supremely confident in is her ability to make to-die-for dresses. The far-more-outwardly-confident Kayla (Jemima Yevu) sees Lenore’s potential and gets her to design some knockout outfits for her that wow their classmates, but also attract the attention of bullies keen to knock the girls down a peg or two. With the help of a sympathetic teacher Ms Hall (Jolene Purdy), Lenore gets the chance to mount her own catwalk show, but Lenore’s protective mom (Missi Pyle) feats that her girl is running the risk of crushing disappointment.
Empire Waist has some hot-button topics to address about how teenagers view themselves, and there’s also a sub-plot about shared, intimate photographs that’s handled in a manner that’s PG-13 appropriate. But Empire Waist isn’t a polemic, and is more concerned with providing an upbeat platform for a personable cast to win us over; Kaplan and Yevu both shine, and Ayoub’s script shows how confidence shifts between the two girls, but ultimately becomes a shared attribute that blossoms through their support for each other. John Hughes remains the grandaddy of the teen movie genre, but there’s elements of his films which are way outdated in the social media era; Empire Waist takes its name from a flattering cut, but it’s incisive in depicting the various traps and fissures that exist for girls in the modern school environment.
Another big plus here is Missi Pyle, a great performer with nearly 200 credits to date, and finding unexpected depth here as Lenore’s mom; she’s got her own body-image anxieties, but manages to stop projecting her own fears onto her daughter, and that chimes in with the film’s wider themes about self acceptance. And as with the recent Weird Al movie, it’s also a big plus to see Rainn Wilson, still a legend from his role as Dwight Schrute in the superior US version of The Office. Schrute is one of the great comic characters of American television, a super-salesman from a farming background whose outwards arrogance hides surprising tenderness. There’s elements of that character here, and Wilson and Pyle’s presence should help draw interest to this relevant, pertinent film, one that dares to go into female coming-of-age dramas in a way that few do, and comes up with a winning, yet thoughtful story of dressing for success.
