Forbidden Fruits is the girly pop answer to movies that continue to define stories about women in single facets as if we don’t contain multitudes. This movie shatters this notion that women can’t be edgy, girly, bubbly and pink, sensual, and absolutely brutal all wrapped up in one. And because of this Forbidden Fruits is one of my favorite movies of the year.
At the center of this movie we have four young women. Three of them work at a boutique in a random mall in Texas. You have Apple, played by Lili Reinhart, who is the calculating leader of this “coven” that everyone at the mall envies because they want to be like them or part of them. Then there’s Fig, played by Alexandra Shipp, who is the edgy mysterious one. And then you have Cherry, played by Victoria Pedretti, who loves pink and everything soft but is kind of ditzy.
Together these three fruits have created a sort of hierarchy and kingdom at the mall grounded in sisterhood, fear, and loyalty. And it’s not until Lola Tung’s Pumpkin comes onto the scene that the world they’ve built starts crumbling. Overall, we’ve seen this kind of story before. The difference with Forbidden Fruits, and this “snake in the garden” story, is that it’s set in a heightened reality that is unapologetically centered around women without pigeon-holing us or making us feel like spectators in our own story.
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Pumpkin, Apple, Cherry, and Fig aren’t spectators in this tale. They are the center. And you can even see that in the way Forbidden Fruits is filmed.
Case in point when Pedretti aka Cherry was changing into a skirt in the boutique. The way that that scene was filmed, it wasn’t about sexualizing her or making her an object that you strip bare with your eyes. Instead it was about a glimpse into her day that didn’t care if the audience wanted to be titillated. Cherry was trying on a skirt because she wanted to. And when you’re so used to seeing women’s bodies be sexualized even when trying on something as simple as a skirt, this moment seems shocking.
The same thing goes for Reinhart, Shipp, and Tung. All stunningly beautiful women. None of them were they sexualized or entered into sexual situations unless they decided to. And there’s power in that decision. Plus it elevates everything that Apple, Fig, Cherry, and Pumpkin do in this film because it’s grounded in a world where they are allowed and encouraged to be the most honest yet messy versions of themselves, leading to a story that feels rich and like nothing I’ve seen before but desperately want more of.
But the true true heart of this movie is Tung’s Pumpkin.
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For the longest time I couldn’t pin Pumpkin down. And it wasn’t because Tung was doing a bad job or the character was bad. It’s just that Pumpkin was everything. She was confident and shy, aggressive and kind, and determined but also lost. She was just everything. And of course she was going to upend this little system that the fruits had at that mall. She was chaos but she was also the most realistic portrayal of how multifaceted women are.
If there’s any complaint that I have about Forbidden Fruits, it’s that I don’t know if I 100% love the ending. I understand that there’s this message of a continuous cycle of sisterhood found through brutality. But I think Apple should have died and Pumpkin should have survived. Heck, Cherry and Fig should’ve survived too. And they could’ve been a new page in this coven grounded in true sisterhood instead of fear.
Nevertheless, I want to see more stories about brewing jealousies, challengers, sisterhood, and fear through the lens of women like director and writer Meredith Alloway and writer Lily Houghton. Because they took a story that on the surface feels like The Craft but girly pop, and managed to tell a story about the bonds that bring us together as women and the limitations that come with the notion that we can only be one thing. We are multitudes. We always have been.
Forbidden Fruits is now available to stream.
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