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| Bel Powley stars in writer-director Marielle Heller's new film The Diary of a Teenage Girl. |
Never
have I been a teenage girl. It is a flaw of mine that cannot be corrected. That
being true, I am not the target audience for The
Diary of a Teenage Girl, nor am
I probably in a position to gauge its reality and emotional honesty. I can
say this about first-time writer-director Marielle Heller’s new film, based on
the semi-autobiographical novel by Phoebe Gloeckner: It is beautifully acted
and lovingly crafted, and it certainly feels real.
Relative newcomer Bel Powley plays Minnie, a 15-year-old
girl growing up in ’70s San Francisco and exploring her burgeoning sexuality. Her
mother is mostly absent from her life, her little sister is too young to
understand her experiences, and her primary father figure no longer lives
nearby. For all intents and purposes, she is alone, and the film does an expert
job of depicting how Minnie conflates physical closeness with emotional
connection.
At one point, she strips naked and looks herself over in her
bedroom mirror. In voiceover, she says she desperately wants somebody to touch
her body, but she fears no one will ever want to. The combination of desire,
low self-esteem, and teenage hormones makes Minnie vulnerable, and the first
person to pounce on that vulnerability is Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), her
mother’s boyfriend.
There is no sugarcoating in the script, which opens with the
line, “Today, I had sex for the first time. Holy shit.” Minnie loses her
virginity to Monroe. They will have many more sexual liaisons, which are
depicted explicitly but not luridly throughout the film. It is hard to say how
a male director would have handled this material, but as forthright as Heller
is with her lead’s sexuality, the scenes are photographed matter-of-factly,
with little prurient interest.
We are not meant to be turned on by this love affair, but we
should not be repulsed either. Like Minnie, the audience is on a journey of
discovery. We have the benefit of distance and the knowledge that this
relationship is damaging to her. Minnie does not have this benefit and must
learn, as we all do, by trial and error.
Powley, who has appeared on a number of British television
series and in one previous feature film, is the heart of the movie. Everything
rests on her ability to convey the feeling of being aggressively sexual but too
inexperienced to understand how that sexuality will affect her life and
relationships. Powley carries this off with brightness and the kind of
cock-eyed certainty youth affords.
Skarsgård is good enough as Monroe to make you almost forget
the creepy, predatory nature of the character and feel sorry for this doofus
who does only what is most convenient for him – almost. Kristen Wiig, who plays
Minnie’s mom, is also solid in the mostly dramatic role of a woman whose life
has not tuned out the way she hoped and which continues to spiral out of
control.
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| Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgard also star. |
The world needs more stories like this, preferably, as in
this case, told by female storytellers. Heller, who spearheaded the effort to
bring The Diary of a Teenage Girl to
the screen, is a clearly gifted filmmaker. She and cinematographer Brandon
Trost, known mostly for his work on action films, capture the gauzy feel of the
early ’70s and deftly parallel that with the haze of being a teenager in a
world for which you are not quite prepared.
Immediately after watching the film, I was troubled by the
almost single-minded focus on Minnie’s sexuality. She has few other defining
traits. She wants to be an artist and is often shown drawing. She has some
correspondence with artist Aline Kominsky, who in the timeline of the film, is
yet to become Robert Crumb’s wife but who is already a talented artist in her
own right. That is about it, though. She is a wannabe artist who is obsessed
with sex.
I wondered if this is a reductive view of teenagers in
general and teenage girls in particular. Surely, teenage girls must have more
on their minds than sex, having sex, and who will have sex with them. Minnie
does not seem to think about anything more than sex and has conversations that
always wrap back around to sex in some way. I initially considered this a
failure on the part of the film, particularly as there are so few stories in
theaters about teenage girls and their real lives – anyone living in a
dystopian sci-fi future or who is in love with a vampire does not count.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I reconsidered
this position. I made the mistake of asking Minnie to represent all teenage
girls – again, due to their lack of representation in the marketplace, this was
just my first instinct – but this is an unfair burden to place upon the film.
Given the semi-autobiographical nature of the source material, it would be more
fitting to view this as the story of one teenage girl. Minnie is a specific
person. She is no one’s archetype, and her preoccupations are her own.
Seen in this light, the problem is less with the film and
more with the Hollywood system that refuses to tell relatable stories about
teenage girls. I promise teenage girls go to the movies just as much as teenage
boys; however, it is doubtful the two demographics are served by the same
films. The solution, then, is not to quibble over the story of Minnie, who has
every right to be whomever she wants to be, but instead to push for more films
about girls like Minnie but whose preoccupations may be different. That would
be progress.
See it? Yes.
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