Gražuolė

Inga is the spitting image of her beautiful, but exhausted single mother. The six-year-old girl imitates the older woman’s gestures in a mirror. Her self-image is confirmed in a game she plays with the neighbourhood children. Dancing in the park, or the courtyard, she is showered with compliments – “She’s beautiful like a fairy tale princess” and “She dances like a snowflake”. That is, until a young boy moves into her building who doesn’t play the game by the rules. He calls her ugly and says she has a swollen head. That catapults Inga into her first identity crisis and sends her to the beauty salon … In his previous film, Mergaitė ir aidas (The Girl and the Echo, 1964), Arūnas Žebriūnas set a young girl on a beach holiday adrift amid a gang of young ruffians. In The Beauty, too, the director depicts a naïf confronted with prepubescent male aggression. But like D’Artagnan, the hero of her secret night-time reading, Inga emerges from every challenge victorious. Because, in the end, she realises that in life, as at the cinema, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.