The horny boy has been a staple of the teen movie, with girls there merely to be convinced of a tryst, but there have been overtures to reverse this bias of late: Juno, Turn Me On Goddammit, and TV’s My Big Fat Diary and Raised By Wolves, all boast hot-to-trot teenage girls. This adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 half-graphic novel by first time writer-director Marielle Heller is a challenging take on the coming-of-age drama.
“I hate men. I hate them so much I f**k them hard, hard, hard.” San Francisco fifteen-year-old budding artist Minnie (a wonderful turn by Londoner Bel Powley, A Royal Night Out) isn’t being entirely truthful. Men are all she thinks about and she welcomes the advances of the handsome Monroe (Skarsgard), her coke-snorting mother’s (Wiig) latest boyfriend. A flirt turns to a grope to a full-blown affair, with the jubilant Minnie, in a Chekovian plot device, recording her thoughts and feelings onto tape…
The ease in which Diary… taps into a teenager’s world is beautiful. The narcissism; the libido-driven emotions; equating attention with love; the body insecurity; her asking him to take a Polaroid afterwards to see if she looks different; the confusion at his emotional distance post-coital; the flirting with another boy to make him jealous. And there’s conflicting messages a befuddled brain must process: Her mother encourages her to show a little more skin to attract boys despite this being the height of seventies feminism, and when she garners the attention of the school stud she’s called a ‘slut’.
Heller insures that Diary… doesn’t behave like a typical teen movie. It’s funny, it’s shocking, it’s cute, it offers no easy answers, and it doesn’t moralise. Unlike Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen there’s little made of Minnie being under age - seen through the eyes of a child who believes she’s an adult, this isn’t an issue for Minnie; the adults – including Minnie’s dad Christopher Meloni – are also children playing adults. Monroe is a letch but a three dimensional one. When Minnie and a friend fellate two guys in a bar bathroom to exercise their newfound sexual empowerment there’s immediate regret: “Let’s not do that again.” Bar the clothes and the cool soundtrack, Heller makes only passing nods to the era: attending a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and a Patty Hearst news report on TV.
It’s wonderful stuff but Heller momentarily takes her eye off the ball and veers close to Larry Clark territory when Minnie embarks on a lesbian relationship with a girl who descends into drug addiction: it smacks of an autobiographical episode but has little to do with the main narrative thrust.
A refreshing shake up of the teen movie, both Heller and Powley are names for the future.