This is beautifully and artistically filmed with painterly backgrounds and color schemes. And excellent acting from the main characters. But Charli is impossible to like or even care about. She is a survival machine, fueled by drugs. She treats everybody equally badly and uses them, making me wonder why anyone stuck around for as long as they did.
It helps that she is gorgeous, with a stunning body. If she were the average, lumpen proletariat, would we care even less what happens to her as a person who mistreats others, lies, cheats, steals, and sells herself to get some pills? There has to be some point where we like the main character enough to root for her to at least reach some understanding and insight into life. But alas, I couldn't tolerate her constant disrespect and mood swings, even if I understood it was caused by mental illness.
We are first introduced to her emotionally blackmailing her mother. Behaving like "queen-baby" furiously demanding money one moment and sobbing and acting helpless the next. Threatening that she will die and laying a heavy guilt trip on mom. Mom is another enabler she surrounds herself with, that finally gives into Charli's raw passion to get more drugs for herself.
Knowing that she has borderline personality disorder is not enough for me to feel sympathy for her. And that is the dilemma of personality disorders. We know the people are sick and suffering but their behavior is impossible to deal with after a while. They have very little insight into themselves and are considered difficult to treat because of this.
At one point Charli yells at a cat that never shows up to be fed, calling it an "ungrateful ---- cat!" That is what I feel about Charli. She is gorgeous, has friends that have stuck with her, a job where she can be of some help to others--but there's no gratitude for any of it.
Another time, she screams over the phone at her roommate Zee, "You selfish, entitled b!" Again, she could be looking in the mirror as she yells this, because that is exactly how she portrays herself. In this sense, the acting is excellent and real--it's just how much unrelievedly horrible, nasty behavior can we take as we see that her entire reason for living is to get more drugs?
It's not enough to treat everyone like trash so you can survive another day to take more drugs and to go to empty parties and get even more wasted. "Wasted lives looking to get more wasted," could be a summary for the plot. It shows the pointless, empty life of someone who has many privileges yet can only sit in the corner furiously licking her wounds because the world didn't cater to her needs.
The fact that Charli works in the healthcare industry is a wry commentary on organized medicine and some of its participants. All of society is under indictment for producing people whose reptilian brains run them, even if they try to numb them out through substances--many of which were prescribed by the healthcare industry, to "help" initially, but ended up enslaving people.
The reptilian brain finds its way through this film over and over again and it's not pretty to watch. To some extent, it describes a world of people who are driven by the mechanical need to survive at all costs, sometimes preferring absolute fury and desperation to the supposed oblivion of death. Being furiously miserable is a better alternative to the unreflecting lizard than not living at all.
The physical closeness in this film is also not sensuous or loving. Love is totally lacking in this film except for as portrayed by the roommate Zee, who shows great latitude in accepting Charli's moody, hostile behavior. "Borderline" shows what it is to live all day long without love, mistaking carnality for it at times, but love doesn't show up. Reptiles don't love and neither do people who are so into themselves they've forgotten how to treat others.
Even though this is a fascinating portrayal of manipulation and fakery to gain one's ends, it is not an easy film to watch in terms of character. Yet the director shows enormous talent in how the shots are set up as well as portraying a very real problem in our society today.
