Saturday, July 8, 2017

The 50 best films of 2015 / Diary of a Teenage Girl / No 16

The 50 best films

of 2015

in the US

No 16

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

The Diary of a Teenage Girl review – a scaldingly honest coming-of-age comedy

5/5stars

Often close to the bone, this exceptional film pulls off something seldom seen in cinema: a document of nascent female sexuality

Leslie Felperin
Thursday 6 August 2015 21.05 BST

ased on Phoebe Gloeckner’s remarkable, sui generis semi-autobiographical graphic novel, this scaldingly honest comedy-drama surveys a rocky stretch in the adolescence of whipsmart 15-year-old budding artist Minnie (the incandescent Bel Powley, from Benidorm and A Royal Night Out).

The story unfolds in a post-hippy mid-70s San Francisco when Quaaludes were plentiful, inhibitions were scarce and boundaries porous. It was a time when repertory screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show drew crowds of crossdressing kids every weekend, the gay scene around Castro Street was flourishing, and few adults thought sex with underage teenagers counted as paedophilia. Minnie’s self-absorbed, bohemian mother Charlotte (Kristen Wiig) positively encourages her kid to flaunt her body and party with the grownups, but prickles with jealousy when Minnie starts drawing men’s attention away from her.

Desperate for affection and irrepressibly curious about sex, Minnie willingly loses her virginity to Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), Charlotte’s dim-bulb 35-year-old boyfriend, but their subsequent affair destabilises Minnie emotionally. Soon, she’s hooking up with kids her own age (both boys and girls), necking drugs and getting advice from the animated spirit of comic-book creator Aline Kominsky. (Curlicue hand-drawn cartoons blossom frequently throughout, touching base with the source material’s distinctive visual style while adding an aptly hallucinogenic vibe when required.)

So it’s morally complex and sometimes uncomfortably close to the bone, but also lushly bawdy and funny, and packaged together with an astonishing degree of cinematic brio by first-time writer-director Marielle Heller. An actor herself, she draws gutsy, self-pity-free performances from her ensemble, especially Powley and Wiig, and expertly fillets a well-balanced feature-length script out of Gloeckner’s baggy, sometimes too-gruelling narrative.

For example, Minnie’s relationship with the beautiful but irretrievably broken Tabitha (Margarita Levieva) is much less toxic than it is in the book. Meanwhile, every period detail is note perfect, from the burnt orange and beige decorating schemes and sheep fleece coat linings to the mix of glam rock (T Rex, Mott the Hoople) and proto-punk (the Stooges, Television) on the soundtrack. Director of photography Brandon Trost’s camera even captures the distinctive light of San Francisco: a mix of salt fog, sun flare and stale incense smoke.

The BBFC has awarded the film an 18 certificate because of the “strong sex scenes”, images of penises “both erect and flaccid”, and scenes of drug use, among other things, but it’s less explicit than many other 18 films. There’s certainly a logic to the classification, but no doubt clever girls, like the heroine herself, will find a way to access this film eventually, and find in it a story that speaks to them without sentiment or cant.

THE GUARDIAN