Opening Night, New Directors/New Films 2015


WIIG, SARSGARD, ET AL. IN DIARY

Growing up bold and hedonistic in Seventies San Francisco

In The Diary of a Teenage Girl, first-time director Marielle Heller succeeds admirably in adapting Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel—about sexual and drug experimentation in 1970s San Francisco. This is due primarily to the discovery of young English actress Bel Powley, whose precocious 15-year-old character Minnie Goetze, Gloeckner's alter ego, is in every scene and voice-over narrates in a facsimile of Minnie's cassette-taped diaries. "Oh my God, I had sex today!" she breathlessly declares at the very outset. And she's had sex, for the first time but by no means the last, with her mother (Kirsten Wiig's) boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), a handsome, slightly goofy, beer-quaffing almost-hippie. For a while, this titillating and ostensibly shocking material is wholly absorbing and almost delightful. It may go on a few minutes too long, but Heller & Co. have got it right.

Without being sticklers for accuracy, the filmmakers have used their faded sepia cinematography and authentic locations to recreate the mood and look of 1975 San Francisco beautifully. This is still going on, and works pretty well for those of us who were there, all the way to the end of the film when its lack of a strong story line has caused interest in Minnie to fade. For young women looking for experiences to identify with, there may be no fading. Kirsten Wiig keeps her edge as the hard-partying mom, though the role isn't one quite worthy of a comic of Wiig's caliber. For those young women, Skarsgård's generic attractiveness and almost perfect replication of an ineffectual young American male may stay interesting, even if it's clearly no more than skin-deep.

The important aspect of the film, for sophisticated and broad minded audiences, is that it manages to show a 35-year-old adult male deflowering (at her instigation) and repeatedly bedding an underage girl, without seeming shocking or in bad taste. It's a situation that fits in perfectly with semi-boho 1975 San Francisco while it might feel decadent or repellant shown in another milieu. Gloeckner was putatively depicting the environment where she actually grew up. This is an era of hedonism: Minnie is unabashedly hedonistic. And as Bilge Ebiri wrote at Sundance for The Vulture, "the earthiness that Heller and Powley bring to Minnie’s experimentation with sex, drugs, and independence is refreshingly amoral, funny, and poignant."

The Diary of a Teenage Girl is one of those cute-bold-offbeat indie films Sundance dreams of, one that convinces, that has a point of view, and flows. Ideally, it will appeal to an audience beyond young women or nostalgia seekers. Another element that makes it worth watching is the most specifically autobiographical one. Minnie (so brightly and compellingly embodied by Bel Powley) is wide eyed and naive but also boldly experimental and gloriously enthusiastic about sex (some little animations, adding to the post-Flower Child era feel, embellish this). But she's also a budding Crumb-style cartoonist and graphic artist, filling sketchbooks with drawings and comic page layouts on a daily basis. As with so many coming of age stories about a young artist, the main event is that becoming -- going out into the world with her drawings. This too the film effectively portrays, thus giving the film a little wider context.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 100 mins., debuted at Sundance 2015. Now a Sony Pictures Classics release. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, a series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.