Billie Eilish: The World's A Little Blurry [15]

Dir: RJ Cutler

Unless you’ve had your head in the sand for the past three or four years, you’ve heard of Billie Eilish. I was, as ever, a latecomer, only discovering her with the video for When The Party’s Over, but she had been building a dedicated and exponentially expanding fanbase online for some time before that. A key part of her appeal, perhaps especially to her own generation (she is still just 19), is her apparent openness and honesty. She’s been candid, in her music and interviews, about depression, anxiety, her Tourette syndrome, and much more, forging a strong connection with her fanbase. In The World’s A Little Blurry, director RJ Cutler (a prolific documentarian, perhaps best known for The September Issue) takes a long close-up look at Eilish and her family in the time between the writing of her first album and her triumph at her first Grammys.

Perhaps perversely for a film about a hugely successful musician, the parts of The World’s A Little Blurry that dwell on the music are often the least interesting passages of the film, or rather they’re only particularly interesting in how they contribute to what the film really strikes me as; a study of a sometimes vulnerable, ultimately very normal, teenager as she navigates extraordinary circumstances, and deals with the usual teenage bullshit. This is partly because her process with her brother and producer Finneas has been well documented, seeing them actually construct songs is instructive, as are the extensive concert sequences, and some of the behind the scenes looks at the struggles of touring, but these are the elements of the film that we already know and that feel like they could come from any documentary about a touring musician. They are also arguably where Cutler could reduce what is an overindulgent 140-minute running time. 

What’s more interesting is the picture the film builds of Eilish. She and Finneas are both clearly preternaturally talented and you would expect that to manifest in confidence in what they do, we definitely see that in Finneas, especially when he says he aims for every song they write to be the best song they’ve ever written, but it seems not to be the case for Billie, who we often see needing her brother’s encouragement and reassurance. Much of the footage just between Eilish and her family looks as though it was shot by them, or certainly with a very tiny crew, and while of course editing can radically alter perception in documentaries, each moment at least seems honest and unfiltered. Billie and Finneas’ parents emerge as interesting characters here. Many things, as when her Dad gives Billie a ‘be careful’ speech the first time she is about to take her car out on her own, then reminisces about the end of his daughter’s childhood, are very normal everyday parent moments, but obviously, the circumstances are also often almost surreal. Their mother and father are sometimes visibly astonished by what’s happening to their children’s lives, but also seeming to do a good job of taking it in stride and help their daughter process it. Only in one moment do they seem to sugarcoat something, saying “we let you down” when she is upset over negative feedback after a meet and greet she didn’t want to do with record company people, but again there’s insight here; a moment less of managing an artist and more of managing a teenager who had a moment where she was just sick of doing something.

The World’s A Little Blurry is a coming-of-age film of sorts. Not only does it mark milestone birthdays, it uses both Billie’s learning to drive and a relationship (which never seems all that healthy) as throughlines, charting important stages of each of them. The relationship in particular seems to see her grow up. Early on we overhear several cutesy conversations on the phone, later we find Eilish bemoaning the fact that her boyfriend won’t make more time for her and one troubling moment finds her telling her parents that, even though he hurt himself punching a wall, this guy would never hit a person. By the end of the film, we definitely see a person with more perspective and a greater understanding both of what she wants and why neither she nor her boyfriend was getting it in that relationship. It’s a real maturation. I would say we also see maturation in Eilish’s relationship with Justin Bieber. We hear a lot about how, when she was 12, she was so obsessed with him that her mother considered getting her therapy and, in one of the film’s most disarming moments, we see their first meeting, and Eilish very much back to being that little girl, sobbing while Bieber hugs her. By the end though, we find her much more assured and comfortable; touched but not overwhelmed when Bieber calls to congratulate her after the Grammys.

Much as they do in her music, I think Billie Eilish’s fanbase will find much to connect with in The World’s A Little Blurry. Eilish is open about her challenges and problems (an impactful moment shows us a page from her journal written when she was self-harming), and the end of the doesn’t find her having unlocked all the answers, but what her fans have always seemed to find in her is someone whose experiences reflect their own and who can articulate them in a way that speaks powerfully to them. This film, while it’s overlong and restates plenty of things we’ve already heard from and about Eilish, will also give them that.

★★★½

Growing Pains @ London Film Festival 2019

For the ninth year in a row, I will be attending the London Film Festival as press, while most of the coverage will be at my other film blog 24FPS, I will be posting my reviews of the wide variety of teen and coming of age films playing at the festival here at Growing Pains. These reviews are of LFF titles viewed on the digital press library. The festival runs from October 2nd - 13th. You'll find ticket links for each film at the end of this post.

My Extraordinary Summer With Tess

Dir: Steven Wouterlood

My Extraordinary Summer With Tess is about a big week in the life of ten-year-old Sam (Sonny Coops Van Utteren). On holiday with his family, he meets the eccentric Tess (Josephine Arendsen) and the two strike up a fast friendship, with Tess asking for Sam’s help when Hugo (Johannes Kienast) and Elise (Terence Schreurs) arrive to stay in the holiday cottage her mother owns. Initially, Sam thinks Tess has a crush on Hugo, but it turns out that she believes he’s the father she’s never met.

For an 81 minute film, My Extraordinary Summer With Tess is busy. As well as the main plot between Sam and Tess there is a focus on Sam’s fatalistic outlook on life - he’s trying to fit practice at being alone in every day, because as the youngest of his family he feels he needs to prepare for when his mother, father and brother are no longer around. This, along with the familial themes of the main story, sounds fairly heavy, but the film is determinedly pitched at an audience the same age as Sam and Tess. In that way, it captures rather well the particular stage many kids are at ten and eleven; grasping the basic concepts of issues like relationships between adults, the challenges of being a parent and the fact their family may not be around forever, but with only a limited understanding of what those things truly mean. This lack of nuance is felt in the characters, but crucially not in the film itself, and that rings true of who these kids are.

Sonny Coops Van Utteren and Josephine Arendsen are both excellent. He as the more serious and melancholy kid, she as a ball of sunshine that, as is often the case, is masking some of her own melancholy. They play off each other well, capturing the way that kids can have their petty disagreements but make up almost instantly (the way Tess plays off the idea of apologising for abandoning Sam on the first day they hung out is especially well written and played). The characterisations are fairly broad - which also extends to the adults - but for the audience this is aimed at, they will work. Kids will likely be charmed by Sam and Tess, but the deeper themes of family, friendship and how both are to some degree chosen and both are to be cherished will resonate, because they are pitched at the right level.

On the whole, the film is energetic, sweet and bright. What it does lack is context, we get little sense of who Sam and Tess are outside this very contained space of the week in which they are hanging out, and the film is a little simplistic when it comes to the complexity of the issues surrounding Hugo, which it could probably have unfolded in more detail while still being suitable for a young audience. Overall though, this is a charmer and another argument that LFF’s Family programme should get more coverage.

★★★½

Adolescents

Dir: Sébastien Lifshitz

Being a teenager is an experience that is at once commonplace and singular. That seems to be what Sébastien Lifshitz is trying to explore with Adolescents, which follows Anaïs and Emma from the ages of 13 to 18. Though from different backgrounds Anaïs very working class and Emma clearly more upper middle class, the two are initially close friends. We follow them as they take different routes, Anaïs vocational high school and Emma a more academic track. Across 135 minutes, Lifshitz’ camera observes as they go through the regular trials and tribulations of their teen years, among them boys, exams and difficult relationships with family.

Initially, the film is very engaging. Lifshitz seems to take a Fred Wiseman type approach, documenting without (at least as far as we hear) asking questions or providing contextualising narration or captions. The things we see are very normal but extremely vivid; the girls chatting about which boys they like, sulky teen girls arguing with their parents, kids horsing around in class. It’s all very familiar. If you can cast your mind back to being a teenager, there’s every likelihood that you’ll find yourself cast back to a similar moment in your own life.

There is some attempt to structure the film around political events (Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan and the election between Marine LePen and Emmanuel Macron are all seen), but only the election draws much from either Anaïs or Emma and because Lifshitz isn’t engaging from behind the camera, what discussion there is ends up brief and surface level. This gets to the larger problem with the film. After the first act, we’ve already been through most of the types of scene we’ll see, and much of the last 100 or so minutes of the film feels repetitious. Yes, events intervene, especially in Anaïs’ life, but again, because the director doesn’t discuss anything with his subjects and, left to their own devices, they’re not expressing much in our direction, the insight feels lacking.

There are powerful moments in the second half of the film, many of them centering on Anaïs’ relationship with her sickly mother, but equally there is so  much we hear about (notably six weeks in which Anaïs had to take care of her younger siblings after her mother had a breakdown), which promise to be much more compelling and insightful than yet another scene of Emma being stroppy with her mother over homework. Looking at this film next to the great documentary about teenagers coming of age - Hoop Dreams - Adolescents’ flaws become crystal clear. While Hoop Dreams managed to explore its protagonists lives while also crystallising issues of class and family, this film always feels hazy. It has the ambition to delve into those same themes, but by stepping back so much it never makes them a strong throughline.

The film’s final scenes raise one last issue. For the second half of the film, we have never seen Anaïs and Emma interact. This makes sense; they move in different groups, they have different ambitions, people grow apart. The last moments see them together, seemingly as warm and close as ever. Is this their first meeting for years or have they remained friends off camera? We never know, because when they aren’t together they never mention each other and here that is never clarified, either by the film or by them. This raises the spectre of a much more contrived narrative than Lifshitz seems to want to suggest he’s constructing here, and for me that undermines the film even further.

I can see, and would likely love, the film Adolescents wants to be, but for me the collection of footage never coalesced into anything as thoughtful or insightful as its ambitions. 

★★

My Extraordinary Summer With Tess plays in the Family strand on October 6th. The screening is sold out, but returns might be available on the day.

Adolescents plays in the Journey strand on October 7th and 8th.