Screened in competition at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, Sauli Plevaite's feature debut, Toxic, is a poignant coming-of-age story that avoids clichés as its 13-year-old protagonists grapple with their bodies and identities in a hot Lithuanian summer.
Maria (Vesta Matuletti) and Cristina (Eva Rubicaite) are two young girls who become friends when they aspire to attend a modeling school that promises them an escape from their bleak reality.
“When I was 13, it was very common for very young teenage girls, 12 or 13 years old, to try out for modeling agencies,” says Bleviti. diverse“Girls from the Baltic countries were very popular. You know, they had pale skin and skinny bodies. My personal experience was taking part in this test, standing in very long lines at the mall. We all looked the same in this girl factory.”
“I joined a modeling agency. I was very skinny at the time — I was 14 or something. And I remember the lady measuring me and saying, you know, I need to lose weight from here, and she started drawing lines on my body, like really big parts. And I remember my mother’s eyes. She was looking at it and thinking, ‘Where are these big parts that I need to lose?’ When I look at it now, it was a really tough experience for a very young teenage girl.”
The idea for the film was partly inspired by Ashley Sabin and David Redmond's 2011 documentary “Model Girl,” and partly by her own experience. “When I saw that film, I remembered what it was like, and the casting process I was involved in,” she says.
When she was casting the film’s female leads, was she concerned about repeating some of the circumstances she wanted to document? “We met with a lot of girls over the course of two years. These casting sessions were very relaxed. We would meet with the girls and talk to them. That was part of the information gathering. Not just to cast the female leads, but we would have conversations with these girls about their experiences related to the script and the story. That was a conversational meeting and I was using their stories in the film as well. So I tried to leverage the casting experience in that way. Once we had a pool of potential candidates for the main characters, we did workshops with all the girls. We did some role-playing. I wanted to make this experience, the casting process, fun.”
Although the story is set in a socially realistic world, the film feels very different from that kind of realism. “I really tried to get as far away from teen movies as possible, where the camera is in your face and you follow the emotions of the characters. I also wanted to make this film about the environment; about the places where the story takes place. There are also these scary elements, the worms and things, because from my experience of teen life, you have a huge area in front of you. It’s like an unknown territory for you. A lot of things are very scary. I wanted to give the audience a sense of that horror movie atmosphere.”
And there's nothing scarier than the changes that happen to your body. “I really wanted to make this film very erotic because it's so much about the body; to make the audience feel that body through the screen. And to show scenes that these girls go through, and deep situations that are very connected to the body. Having a piercing in your tongue. You're touching a body that you've never touched before. You're dealing with your body. You don't understand it. You feel awkward, you know? And I feel like there's a kind of weirdness and ugliness to it, you know, but also a lot of mystery.”
“Toxic” was produced by the Lithuanian independent studio Akis Bado, founded by Giedre Burokaritè and Robertas Nevecka and based in Vilnius. The studio is best known for the award-winning animated short films “Snow Shelter” (2020) and “Mora Mora” (2021). Funded by the Lithuanian Film Centre and Lithuanian National Radio and Television, the title also won the Work in Progress Award at Meeting Point Vilnius 2024.
