Kayleigh Donaldson
It is often joked that there is nothing scarier than a teenage girl. Certainly, pop culture has given us its fair share of portrayals of screeching adolescents ravaged by puberty and slamming bedroom doors. Perhaps such images are more palatable than the thornier truth that being a teenage girl is often terrifying. Finding yourself no longer a child but not an adult, and now the target of leering adult men and slut-shaming, is a treacherous path to navigate. Some filmmakers have used this liminal space in girlhood to reveal the true rot of patriarchal rule, such as Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, but few have done it with the intimacy and terror of Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk.
The lost adolescent of Smooth Talk, which premiered 40 years ago, is Connie (Laura Dern), a 15-year-old in the 1950s American heartland who is spending her summer before sophomore year cruising the mall with her friends and flirting with boys. Her mother, Katherine (Mary Kay Place), never seems to be satisfied with anything Connie says or does, leaving her parental praise for her older daughter, June. All Connie wants is some fun and attention, and the chance to grow up on her own terms.
For the majority of its spry 96-minute running time, the film is a melancholy portrait of a young woman slowly confronted by the tangled complexities of adulthood. Her mother views her with suspicion and a hint of jealousy while warning her of who she fraternizes with. In one moment, she slaps her daughter, a harsh display of motherly panic and control that leaves Connie distraught. As portrayed by a young Dern, who was cast with only two weeks to go before filming commenced, Connie is a familiar figure: the teenage girl who thinks she’s more mature than she actually is. In these scenes, especially as Connie navigates the friction of home life, Smooth Talk is intimate and lived-in. If that were all the film was, it would still be an astute portrait of feminine adolescence. But then the third act turns up.
To talk about Smooth Talk in any substantial way is to give away its true intentions. In its final scenes, Connie is left at home, and a car drives up, with a man looking for her. He calls himself Arnold Friend. He dresses like James Dean, drives a cool Cadillac, and talks like a cool teen greaser, but is clearly in his 30s. At first, he’s kind and flirty, but soon he turns sinister and threatening. Now Smooth Talk has become a serial killer thriller, as Connie locks herself in her home and becomes the prey of a well-trained predator with his eyes on her conquest.
Chopra and screenwriter Tom Cole took inspiration from the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates, itself based on the murders of Charles Schmid. Schmid was nicknamed the Pied Piper of Tucson because he attracted a following of teenagers, and he murdered at least three young women, all of which brought him intense public notoriety once he was arrested.
In Schmid’s story, Oates, who has written some of the most psychologically dense portrayals of criminals in 20th-century American fiction, found inspiration for her own version of the Big Bad Wolf. Her Arnold Friend is a fairy-tale villain, an allegory for rape culture, and perhaps even Satan himself. As played by the perennially underrated Treat Williams, he flips on a dime from charming to murderous. It’s not hard to see why Connie would be taken in by an older man who focuses all of his attention on her, a lonely young woman who wants to be seen as mature. Chopra nails an experience that every woman has had: that sudden moment when the mood flips from fun to not, and you realize that you’re in danger. It happens so suddenly that Connie and the audience are left dizzy. Dern, who has always had one of the greatest crying faces in cinema, conveys the abject nightmare of this “seduction.”
Connie spends the film struggling to establish herself as grown up and independent. Confronted by a familiar monster, the kind she will inevitably meet hundreds of times over the course of her future, she is forced to make an unbearable decision. Suddenly, the neon jukeboxes of the hamburger joint and the safe space of the mall seem hopelessly childish. Smooth Talk ends on a more hopeful note than Oates’s story, suggesting that whatever Connie has gone through will not define her. Arnold’s act breaks down her barriers but she’s going to build them back up and find life beyond his claws. It’s a glimmer of optimism in the face of the rot of patriarchy that every woman is forced to tread through with little to no support. What could be scarier than that?
“Smooth Talk” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
