I Feel Pretty | Film Review

Hey Guys x

I went to see this on a whim last week. I really wanted to see a movie, and this was on at a convenient time, so I thought I'd see it. Plus, I really liked Amy Schumer's first film 'Trainwreck', and hoped that this would be as good as that.

Renee Bennett is a woman who has never felt 'pretty'. She's never been the girl that guys randomly flirt with, and she's never had the looks that go with achieving her dream job - being a receptionist at a cosmetics company. However, one day Renee hits her head, and everything changes. When she looks in the mirror, she sees someone thin and desirable and beautiful. And this completely changes her entire attitude. She has bags of confidence, she's self-assured, she's finally happy. But she also becomes vain, narcissistic and selfish. So when she discovers that her looks actually haven't changed, can she undo the mistakes that she made when she was 'pretty'?

I have mixed feelings about this film.

On the one hand, I think the premise is really interesting. A woman who is not conventionally pretty hits her head, and suddenly starts to love the way she looks, and has confidence in her appearance. If the film was portrayed this way, I'd be fully on board with it, but it wasn't.

Rather than main character Renee becoming confident with her face/body, she wakes up after banging her head and sees herself as someone completely different. To the point where she thinks that she has abs and that her friends won't recognise her because she just changed into a completely different person overnight. I didn't like this at all, mainly because it's kind of saying that this woman (and by extension women who look like her) can't be confident with their own bodies. If Renee had looked in the mirror, seen herself as she was, and decided that she was beautiful, that would have been great. But seeing a different person with an entirely different face and body works completely against what I think the film was trying to achieve.

Something I enjoyed about the film was seeing the way that confidence completely changed Renee's life. She had the confidence to go for that dream job, and although she didn't look the way that the president of the company wanted her to, her confidence was the thing that got her the job, and that's a very important message to portray.

But then there were times when the confidence was just too much. I know this is just how the character was written, but Renee went from being a character that I could relate to, to a character that was just awful, and that I really hated. For example, there's a scene when she basically tells her best friends that she's better than them (and that they're boring) because she's now 'pretty', and I think that was just awful. Having confidence doesn't have to change who you are as a person, and the fact that it did just shows that Renee wasn't a good person in the first place.

I will say though, that the film was acted extremely well. As well as Amy Schumer, it also stars Michelle Williams, Emily Ratajkowski, Busy Phillips and Naomi Campbell (to name a few) and they're all completely amazing in the roles.

Overall, I would only recommend this film to people who are fans of Amy Schumer, or who are genuinely interested in the film after reading some reviews. But be warned that it's not as empowering as it's portrayed to be.

Lou