{"id":10241,"date":"2018-09-20T05:00:37","date_gmt":"2018-09-20T09:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=10241"},"modified":"2019-01-12T14:42:28","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T19:42:28","slug":"films-that-like-get-me-cinemas-realistic-teenage-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/films-that-like-get-me-cinemas-realistic-teenage-girls\/","title":{"rendered":"Films That, Like, Get Me: Cinema’s Realistic Teenage Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bo Burnham\u2019s Eighth Grade<\/i> and Greta Gerwig\u2019s Lady Bird<\/i> have recently been praised for dealing seriously with their young female subjects, the filmmakers giving teenage girls\u2019 lives the meticulous treatment that Hollywood usually reserves for, I don\u2019t know, Breaking Bad<\/i>, or films about dead presidents and accused Communists. We should celebrate, but also look back at what came before. Here we revisit one of the predecessors of Eighth Grade<\/i> and Lady Bird<\/i>, and two of their recent under-sung peers, looking at their achievements in truth-telling, authenticity, and respect for their subject matter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Real Women Have Curves <\/i><\/b>(2002)<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Everyone should be grateful for Real Women Have Curves<\/i>, even if you\u2019ve only just heard of it (if this is the case, you\u2019re welcome.) Not only did it bump up the profile of a young America Ferrera, but it was a template for the kinds of filmmaking we\u2019re seeing now (maybe too close a template: writer Josefina Lopez has dinged<\/span><\/a> Gerwig for Lady Bird<\/i> borrowing too heavily from the plot of Curves<\/i>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

We join Ferrera\u2019s Ana on her way to her last day of high school. The commute from her modest East L.A. home is not especially gritty or dangerous; more than anything, it\u2019s boring. Where the average manic pixie dream girl might spend this montage admiring colorful shopfronts, petting dogs, and being handed flowers at every corner, Ana just gets to walk, ride, and walk some more.<\/span><\/p>\n

Life in Ana\u2019s multi-generational household revolves around matriarch Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros). Day in and day out, she holds court on a continuum of aloof to cruel, berating her daughters over their weight. Her domain extends to the family dress factory. Here, especially, I\u2019m glad that the team behind Curves<\/i> wasn\u2019t determined to make us like Ana; instead, they let her be a surly teenager, offending the nice abuelas<\/i> at their sewing machines. <\/span><\/p>\n

In Curves<\/i>, as in the best young adult films, life is allowed to play out at its weird pace, passing through highs and lows with refreshing casual-ness. There\u2019s no rallying song as Ana grinds out her college application essay \u2014 she just does it. Arguments spark out of nowhere, and confrontations aren\u2019t staged. Like real, pragmatic mothers and daughters, Ana and Carmen fall back together without making up. Tensions and daily skirmishes are never really resolved, but the heat on them is turned down to \u201cwarm\u201d out of necessity, and family life continues. <\/span><\/p>\n

The principal uphill battle of Curves<\/i> is identity, and finding it when so many parts of you \u2014 family, culture, status and self-image \u2014 compete to dictate it to you. Few things are neatly tied off at the end of the film, but there is both beauty and familiarity as we watch Ana lay claim to herself.<\/span> <\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Girlhood<\/i> (or Bande De Filles<\/i>) <\/b>(2014)<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Director C\u00e9line Sciamma took the coming-of-age template to the gritty Paris banlieu<\/i> to make Girlhood<\/i>, an intrepid take on a unique but not unrelatable adolescence. We see Karidja Tour\u00e9 as 15-year-old Marieme, guiding her sisters through bedtime prep, giggling and chiding them about puberty (in the way that sisters can but that grandparents \u2014 think Sixteen Candles \u2014<\/i> shouldn\u2019t.) But the laughter halts, and we watch the joy drain from the girls\u2019 faces as their elder brother slams the apartment door on his way in. More alarm bells go off, and later we see Marieme pleading with a guidance counselor, dancing around nonspecific family problems as she seeks leniency for her poor grades \u2014 no dice. The instinct of kids in rough situations to hide their problems is complicated but universal. It doesn\u2019t take much experience with abuse to see her delicate calculus: Taking action will either make things worse for her and her sisters, or make no difference at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

Enter Lady, a swaggeringly cool older girl and leader of her three-person crew. She calls after Marieme, asking her why she looks \u201ccranky,\u201d before inviting her to join them on a train ride to Paris. Marieme\u2019s antenna is up, but she agrees. Only after the crew comes to her aid in a mall, dressing down a shopgirl for racially profiling their new young charge, does Marieme start to relax. Even if she\u2019s not comfortable with their tactics (or the knife that\u2019s pulled later during a showdown on the train platform) the hostility is validating. Their ease \u2014 laughing and ribbing other girls for their duck faces \u2014 is addicting. We see hope in Marieme as she squirrels away a knife of her own at home \u2014 clearly not for cutting filles<\/i>, but more of an accessory, a badge of belonging (the Heathers<\/i> scrunchie of French girl gangs.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Flash forward and she\u2019s a full-fledged member of the crew, uniformed in denim and straight hair, intimidating a student for money. Before we wonder what happened, we see it on her face, which is downright sad as she returns \u20ac10 to the crew. Swap out names and stakes, and anyone in the audience could be reliving a moment of peer pressure, doing something they were talked into doing but not talked into being okay with. Lady is kind but unmistakably coercive. By being Marieme\u2019s champion against her brother, they tether confidence to compliance, making her eager to please. The mantra they give her to repeat \u2014 \u201cI do what I want\u201d \u2014 is so rich with irony, it\u2019s staggering.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then comes the next gift from Sciamma: the girls\u2019 self-styled music video to \u201cDiamonds\u201d by Rihanna. This is shot to show us how the girls see themselves: Glamorously lit and dressed to the nines, they dance and lip-sync in a hotel room \u2014 free, strong, and resplendent.<\/span><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t understate how insightful Girlhood <\/i>comes across in moments like this. The rationale behind it all \u2014 the intimidation, stolen dresses, and other exploits \u2014 becomes clear: It\u2019s all worth it, because it allows them to feel like this. We see them just how they feel in this moment, and on some level, everything that came before, and even some of what follows, makes sense.<\/span><\/p>\n

Edge of Seventeen <\/i><\/b>(2016)<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Edge of Seventeen<\/i> and its star, Hailee Steinfeld, may not have been feted to the extent that Lady Bird<\/i> and Saoirse Ronan were, but they managed to escape that film\u2019s shadow. And a good thing, too: From the opening bell, Steinfeld substantiates the hype as Nadine, a cool-beyond-her-years high-schooler clearly on the verge of losing her mind. The loss of Nadine\u2019s father, her natural ally, leaves her on rockier emotional footing for the events of the film, which she narrates less with relish than with the practiced voice of someone who, after a sucky day, is asserting narrator\u2019s rights. Sometimes, as an awkward teen, this is what you take solace in: opportunities to vent, entertain and, for us Type-As, the right to dazzle with how smart and engaging we are. <\/span><\/p>\n

But the thing is, Nadine genuinely is<\/i> smart and engaging. Think of her like Say Anything<\/i> hero Lloyd Dobler \u2014 precocious, shifty, and a bit on-edge. Subtract any of his self-assurance, though; for every one step taken forward or message typed out, Nadine takes two back, and mutters aloud about how pathetic she is. One wonders about her self-loathing in relation to her disdain for her golden-boy brother, her distant mother, and people in general. Are they two sides of the same coin? They come off more like a shell game, both insulating Nadine from who she really is, because she may well not know. Trust me \u2014 we\u2019ve all<\/i> been there.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mean Girls <\/i><\/b>(2004)<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Mean Girls<\/i> is by far the least realistic of the films discussed here, but it couldn\u2019t have held its status all these years and birthed a musical (not to mention thousands of memes) without a kernel of realism. Explosively funny as it is, Mean Girls<\/i> takes its subject matter seriously, and it shows.<\/span><\/p>\n

The film plops Cady (Lindsay Lohan), a bright-eyed, nervous former homeschooler, into the dizzying world of North Shore High School. The daughter of scientists fresh off sabbatical in Africa, Cady narrates for us like an anthropologist, describing high school as a \u201cstressful, surreal blur.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Writer Tina Fey and her team knew this would be the umpteenth attempt to chronicle high school life, so they leaned into it, using the 30 Rock<\/i> formula: exaggerate, but only just. (Add up Cady and Lizzy Caplan\u2019s Janis and you get Liz Lemon.) <\/span><\/p>\n

Adapted from the book Queen Bees and Wannabes<\/i>, Mean Girls<\/i> is inspired by garden-variety \u201cgirl-on-girl crime.\u201d The Plastics are meant to be caricatures <\/i>of teen cruelty, but not unrecognizable ones. Most high-schoolers can vouch for these regimented and confusing social dynamics on some level. Every walk down the hallway is full of landmines. Arbitrary rules exist both in and out of the classroom. <\/span><\/p>\n

Sure, the utopian ending is bogus, and no popular girl wears that much argyle. But adjust for comic inflation and a circa-2004 preppy wardrobe, and you may finally be able to give Mean Girls<\/i> its due.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
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Bo Burnham\u2019s Eighth Grade and Greta Gerwig\u2019s Lady Bird have recently been praised for dealing seriously with their young female […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":549,"featured_media":10248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/549"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}