If there’s one thing you should know about the Fruits, it’s that they worship Marilyn Monroe like she was God herself.
This is one of the running gags in Meredith Alloway’s new film, “Forbidden Fruits,” written by Alloway and Lily Houghton and based on Houghton’s 2019 play. The Fruits – a witchy sisterhood of mall workers (think “The Craft” meets “Mean Girls”) – put Monroe on a pedestal above all else. As with most cultural depictions of Monroe, she’s a confluence of contradictions. Powerful and worthy of adoration, yet a sacrificial lamb nonetheless. “No man could control her. Not even the president,” says Apple (Lili Reinhart), the leader of the Fruits, reverently. “And we worship that sacrifice.”
The Fruits are bastions of femininity themselves. They work at Free Eden (a stand-in for the elevated boho-chic boutique Free People), they dress to impress, and whispers follow them wherever they go. In an opening shot, the camera follows them through the food court, Apple at the center and her two minions Fig (Alexandra Shipp) and Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) at her side. They’re mall royalty – they always eat for free, and when they choose where they want to sit, the people already occupying that space clear out.
The Fruits are trying to emulate the type of feminine power they believe Monroe possessed. They make blood pacts, cast hexes, and, when they make a mistake, apologize directly to the source. Whenever one of the Fruits – including new recruit Pumpkin (Lola Tung) – breaks one of Apple’s rules (such as having a boyfriend, or dimming another girl’s shine), they must confine themselves to a dressing room and confess their sins to Marilyn. Marilyn, as she so often does, stands in as little more than a symbol to these girls. They have no interest in her as a person, only as a figure representing their own power – and maybe, that’s where their downfall starts.
“Forbidden Fruits” lives and dies by its aesthetic, a bubble of fantastical color and camp surrounded by the dry, boiling heat of suburban Texas – the mall an oasis for mischief amidst the washed-out drabness of the rest of these girls’ lives. It’s a throwback trying to both capitalize on nostalgia and pave its own way, riffing on 1990s and 2000s female-driven teen films about the performativity of female friendships and the obsessive, violent bonds that form between young women. It works best when it allows you to get lost in its witchy sauce, mesmerized by the soundtrack, the costumes, and its sapphic allure. But, the film has trouble merging its old school vibes with a newer, flatter performance style – one that doesn’t quite gel with the horror-comedy camp highs it’s trying to reach.
The core relationships in “Forbidden Fruits” are ones we’ve seen before. “Mean Girls” is a huge comparison point, down to the fact that both movies filmed in the same mall, and you can almost map the personalities of the Fruits against that film’s four central characters. Apple, much like her counterpart Regina George, sets the rules. But, unlike “Mean Girls,” the rules in “Forbidden Fruits” have less to do with what color you wear on Wednesdays and more to do with perfecting womanhood. In Apple’s view, at least.
The weaponization of femininity and feminism is one of the more interesting themes that “Forbidden Fruits” tackles. Apple is the queen bee, but she is not interested in men whatsoever. Quite the opposite – the first time we meet her, she convinces the guy in the car next to her to masturbate, and then throws flaming hot coffee on his exposed genitals. Monroe (or, the Monroe Apple has made up in her head, at least), stands in as the ideal woman. A woman so powerful that the government had to kill her. That is the kind of power Apple reveres, but also the kind of position – that of a victim – that she has vowed never to find herself in.
Apple’s motive in controlling the other Fruits’ lives – not allowing Cherry to drink and limiting her sexual activity, or not allowing Fig to have a boyfriend at all – is a misplaced savior complex. As secrets about Apple’s past become clear, you come to understand her craving to be surrounded by powerful women. She’s trying to mold her mini-mes into her version of an ideal – creating her own little army of Marilyns. She despises “unattractive” qualities, or weakness of any kind, particularly weaknesses related to men. And the film’s attitude toward heterosexuality is particularly humorous. When Fig finally gives in and starts dating a boy, the final nail in her coffin is her excitement about the prospect of going to an Ed Sheeran concert – the absolute dregs of straight culture.
There is far more explicitly queer bent to “Forbidden Fruits” than so many of the films that it draws from. When Pumpkin arrives on the scene, Apple is not so obtuse to think she doesn’t have some ulterior motive for wanting to join their little coven, but she’s intrigued by the prospect of a new doll to play with (literally – when Pumpkin jokes about having always wanted to be a doll, to let someone play dress up and braid her hair, Apple’s eyes light up with a feral glee). The lustful undertones that exist in most of those films are brought to the surface, particularly through Pedretti’s turn as Cherry, who constantly stares at Apple with a mixture of lust and mania, obsessed with her own tormentor (she possesses most of those “unattractive” qualities that Apple hates so much).
Pedretti gives unequivocally the best performance in the film, transforming herself into Marilyn via Juicy Couture, putting on a baby voice and playing up Cherry’s insecurity and vulnerability through her sexy baby cosplay. But, while she brings the proper energy that “Forbidden Fruits” needs to fully succeed as something beyond an aesthetic feast, there is a flatness to the other performances that doesn’t quite gel with the world that Alloway has built. That flatness feels connected to modern teenagedom in a way that everything else doesn’t.
Eventually, things ramp up to an exciting, bloody conclusion. But before we hit that climax, that lack of zing muddies the waters, and reveals flaws that might have otherwise been easy to overlook. “Forbidden Fruits” has the feel of a movie about the relationships between teenage girls, but none of these girls are teenagers (not just in real life, but canonically). Their attitudes, then, feel a little misplaced, like Lost Boys who never grew up. The movie exalts the power of the mall in a way that feels very early 2000s, but that aura falls apart the minute someone pulls out an iPhone. As fun as “Forbidden Fruits” can be, it also points out major flaws in the nostalgia machine, and falls just short of being something truly special.