If you happen to know
a brave fifteen-year-old, that’s not too embarrassed to act in an emotional
teenage role, that deals with things teenagers deal with — please have her
contact me. Most of the kids I’ve been
seeing can only handle a part that’s an idealized version of how they want to
be perceived. It’s kind of incredible
that parents would let their children perform in some totally exploitative
slasher movie, but tense up at the opportunity to be a part of a fictional yet
emotionally truthful coming-of-age film.
—Eliza Hittman, director post on the Tumbler blog while
searching to cast her lead character, June 7, 2012
This is a heavily stylized American indie film that offers a
different take on a 14-year old girl’s sexual awakening, shot in the edgy, off
kilter manner of Matthew Porterfield’s Putty Hill
(2010), becoming more of a fragmented, lyrical abstraction than a straightforward
coming-of-age tale, told in a kaleidoscope style of shifting images where the
narrative is supplanted by the sensuality of the imagery. First time writer/director Eliza Hittman grew
up in central Brooklyn in a neighborhood called Flatbush, now given a fancy
real estate name called Ditmas Park, and teaches graduate level directing
classes at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her film premiered at Sundance nearly a year
ago where it was voted (#7) by Laura Kern as one of the Top 10
Films from Sundance 2013 | Film Comment.
What separates this film from others is the slowly building sensuous
undertone that continues to create sexual tension throughout, where because of
the starkly realistic discussion of teen sexuality, the viewer’s expectations
are subverted by the degree of the lead character’s extreme alienation,
becoming a darker, more introverted film.
While the tendency of male directors is to show plenty of nudity in highly
acclaimed coming-of-age films like the Cannes Palme d’Or winner Blue
Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013) and Ozon’s Young
& Beautiful (Jeune & Jolie) (2013), to name two of the select twenty films at
Cannes playing in competition, but Hittman’s film allows for a feminist
interpretation that has historically been viewed through a misogynist lens. Lila (Gina Piersanti) is an alienated girl on
the outside who has just lost her mom, while her father (Kevin Anthony Ryan) is
still a basket case of frazzled nerves.
But our introduction to the character is a wordless opening sequence at
the beach, where Lila’s face has a peculiar white mask effect, caked perhaps by
an excess of sunscreen, but it gives her the theatrical look of a Kabuki style
face, a stand-in for the artificial face teens often show to others in public
while hiding their true self. Already we
can tell she’s different, accompanied by another couple, her best friend Chiara
(Giovanna Salimeni), more sexually experienced, seen openly kissing and
flirting with her boyfriend Patrick (Jesse Cordasco) in Lila’s presence. Not only does she not seem to mind, but she
can also be seen observing them, as a certain voyeurism comes into play, where
underneath it all she craves that same kind of attention.
Shortly afterwards, Lila can be seen hanging out in her
backyard with a younger neighbor boy, Nate (Case Prime), repeating to him
Chiara’s sexual experiences as if they were her own, pretending to be more
sexually active, as if this is the path to popularity and respect. This schism between what’s imagined and
what’s real seems to define what takes place inside a teenager’s head, where they
always want things to be better than they are.
This obsession with sexuality follows Lila throughout the film, where
she literally leads a double life, spending her time pretending to be something
that she’s not. Watching Chiara move
from boy to boy with seeming ease, often rubbing her nose in it, while she
continually watches from the sidelines only makes her feel worse, forced to
wonder what’s wrong with her, where her self-esteem hits rock bottom. Driven for her own emotional connection, she
catches a glance on the beach from an older guy in a tanktop with a tattooed
physique, where she overhears someone describe him as a skanky college guy
horny enough to fuck anything that moves, a “douchebag who’ll sleep with anyone.” The next day, Lila’s at the pool hall where
Sammy (Ronen Rubinstein) works claiming she just happened to be in the
neighborhood. While she continually
places herself in his path, which lends itself to a certain threat of danger,
the viewer is familiar with any number of possibilities, not all of them good, as
Sammy toys with her, but keeps his distance, while Lila is led to believe that
having sex will reveal an ultimate truth and suddenly catapult her into
friendships she otherwise doesn’t have.
While treading in dark territory, the film also has its lighter side,
like Chiara’s 16th birthday party, which turns into a Bat Mitzvah-style
candle-lighting ceremony featuring plenty of food and dancing, while a
melancholic Lila sits alone, pretty much avoided by everybody else, which
perfectly describes her life.
Lila convinces Chiara to crash a drinking party at Sammy’s
house and his macho friends, where the language of misogynist hip-hop music is
blaring all around them, where it’s impossible not to be drowned out by the
prevailing lyrics of incessant fucking.
Despite the fact this is an older crowd downing shots by the second,
Lila is entranced by what she sees all around her, wandering through the rooms
in slow motion, given an impressionistic feel, quickly becoming intoxicated
herself, as Chiara leaves her heaving in the bathroom, spending much of the
evening on the floor. By the time she
comes to her senses, she climbs into bed and switches places with someone who
earlier slept with Sammy, pretending he slept with her when he wakes in the
morning and that he was too drunk to notice.
This little scheme reveals the depth of depravity in this young woman’s
soul, as her yearning to be touched and appreciated, to be part of “the world”
around her overrides everything else, convincing herself that this alternate
world is her reality. When she tells
Chiara that she’s finally sexually active, her friend insists upon making her
an appointment for birth control, an examination that borders on the
surreal. When Lila returns to the scene
of the crime, she is only humiliated even more by Sammy’s debase treatment,
which is juxtaposed by a backdrop of ESPN sports playing in the background,
making the deplorable experience even more banal. As it finally sinks in that she’s fooling
herself, or so it seems to the viewer, thoughts of suicide are everpresent, as
her singular existence is all she can feel, finding herself more alone than
ever, ultimately alienated even from herself, where her path feels desperate. At such a dour moment, there’s an interesting
cut to an up-tempo school dance quartet that bumps and grinds to explicitly
foul rap lyrics, which is literally an assault of the F-word, where practices
progress to performing before the public, where the graphic sexual rhythm
couldn’t feel more out of place, but none more than Lila, who can’t keep up
with the others and is always a bit out of synch. The soft focus cinematography by Sean Porter
creates an experimental mosaic, using plenty of close ups, where the anxiety of
the camera matches the restless inner spirit, told almost subliminally, where
the aesthetic is more about reaching what’s underneath the surface. The film recalls German director Valeska
Grisebach’s first feature BE MY STAR (2001), another film that associates
teenage sexual attraction with an inability to communicate, where the films by
both female directors (likely influenced by Claire
Denis) emphasize textures, duplicating teenage isolation with a meticulous
precision, becoming more about what isn’t shown onscreen, creating a mysterious
ambiguity about the existing emptiness within and the pressures to want sex in
order to finally be accepted.
