The Lifeguard (2013)

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[baumer]

A beautiful film about losing your way and wanting to matter.  Kristen Bell plays Leigh, a 29 year old woman who quits her journalist job in New York and moves back home for the summer because she basically just can't handle life.  She has a bit of a meltdown after writing a story about how a young tiger was left to die in a NY apartment.  And so she just goes home and gets her old job back as a lifeguard.  Her best friend from high school is married, has a seemingly good life but of course what you see on the outside is always deceiving.  Her and her husband are ostensibly trying to have a child but she cannot get pregnant.  There are also the young kids in the film, one of which Leigh starts up a summer fling with.  She's 29 and he's 16 and of course if it were to be discovered that they were intimate, it could get her into a lot of trouble.  But they just seem to fit, they need each other.  Both are lost souls and at the time, they help each other.  Tragedy strikes later in the film and it's here that the film goes from being good to really good.  

 

The Lifeguard is a terrific film that no one saw because it had a budget of about $10.00 (the pool scenes didn't even have many extras as they couldn't afford to pay them) and it had an obvious miniscule release.  And it's too bad.  

 

I finished my top 100 of 2013 recently, this film was obviously not on it as I hadn't seen it until today.  It would have made my top 25.

 

9/10