The third edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies opens this Thursday with *Maddie’s Secret*, the directorial debut of comedian John Early. The film, which first surfaced at Toronto last fall, arrives as a sophisticated piece of stylistic synthesis. Early stars as a culinary influencer navigating the private toll of bulimia, a role that functions as both a "loving pastiche" of the earnest after-school special and a rigorous exercise in distaff performance.
Critics have noted that Early’s approach mirrors the "manicured melodramas" of Golden Age Hollywood, drawing a direct line from the domestic-goddess entrepreneurs of the 1940s—think Claudette Colbert in *Imitation of Life* or Joan Crawford’s *Mildred Pierce*—to the modern influencer. In these narratives, the kitchen serves as a site of both liberation and confinement, where protagonists transcend traditional gender constraints by leaning into them with an almost feverish intensity.
The film’s aesthetic—characterized by an "overenunciated gloss" and a supporting turn by Kate Berlant—suggests that the heightened artifice of mid-century cinema is perhaps the most honest lens through which to view our current era. In a world where social media demands that every gesture be a curated performance, Early uses the tools of the old-world melodrama to deconstruct the performative labor of the present.
With reporting from Criterion Daily.
Source · Criterion Daily
