Towards Maturity through Cosmopolitan Attempts in Party Girl (1995) and God's Own Country (2017); 1st ed.

Regueira Martín, Andrea

En : Cosmopolitan Aspirations in Contemporary Cinema
2025
Routledge London; New York
ISBN: 978-1-032-79498-3
Pp: 21-39

Abstract: This chapter analyses the late coming-of-age process of the protagonists in Party Girl (1996) and God’s Own Country (2017) in order to explore the relationship between the transition to adulthood and cosmopolitanism. For the protagonists of both films, the development of an adult identity is inextricably linked to the development of a cosmopolitan outlook. In the face of a cosmopolitan encounter, both protagonists need to acknowledge the limitations of their initial disposition towards difference. One needs to go beyond the superficiality of her position as a consumer of cosmopolitanism—an ‘aesthetic’ or ‘banal’ cosmopolitan—while the other must let go of prejudice and develop tolerance and acceptance of Otherness. The willingness to be changed by an encounter with difference, then, plays a key role in both characters’ transition to adulthood. However, the two films also underscore the limitations of such an evolution, testing the limits of cosmopolitanism through their almost exclusive focus on privileged points of view that reproduce the same ‘Othering’ dynamics that the protagonists put on display through the films.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003492405-3