Growing Pains @ BFI Flare 2021: My First Summer

Dir: Katie Found

16-year-old Claudia (Markella Kavenagh) and her mother have lived Claudia’s whole life hidden in a cabin in the woods, away from the outside world. After her mother drowns herself, Claudia is surprised when Grace (Maiah Stewardson), who saw the incident, turns up at the cabin. The two develop a friendship that Grace doesn’t seem to have with other teens and that might help bring Claudia out of her hermetically sealed world just a little.

Much of Australian writer/director Katie Found’s feature debut has an almost fairytale feel about it. Claudia’s world, the one Grace first lets herself into and then is granted increasing access to by Claudia, is a place where they seem almost entirely insulated from the outside world. Free from adult influence, they can mess around, eat what they like, and discover themselves. Though both girls are sixteen, they seem younger, Claudia because she has been kept naive about the world by her mother and Grace in the way she dresses all in pink and friendship bracelets, and seems only to eat sweets and chocolate and drink strawberry milk.

The connection between the two girls is forged in stages, Grace’s friendship drawing Claudia out and helping her deal with her mother’s suicide. In one sweetly sad scene, Grace goes for a swim in a shallow part of the river and tries to coax Claudia in with her. When they go underwater, Claudia panics, but Grace—taking on the role Claudia’s mother should have played—holds her, comforts her and makes her feel safe. There is a tenderness in this moment that we see throughout their relationship and the film as a whole, and which makes the connection between the girls something palpable.

Katie Found’s direction also contributes to the tender and intimate feeling of the film. Many of the interactions between Grace and Claudia are observed primarily in close up, the world a hazy thing surrounding them but not really impacting on them. There are of course breaks from this; the aforementioned river scene, a scene of the two dyeing Claudia’s sheets, which turns into a water fight, but most of the time the focus is tightly on the girls and their ever closer bond. It’s a directorial choice that also focuses us on gaze, especially on the way that Grace looks at Claudia with increasing, sometimes thwarted, desire. An amusing example of this comes when, clearly trying to get Claudia to kiss her, Grace asks her to guess different flavours of lip balm and is subtly, but visibly, frustrated when Claudia initially guesses just from the smell. 

Markella Kavenagh and Maiah Stewardson bring the growing bond between the girls to life with playful performances that portray a great comfort in the connection that Grace and Claudia find in each other, which builds into a convincing romantic chemistry. There is always a little more edge in Stewardson’s performance; a sense that Claudia, naive thanks to her upbringing, could misread something from Grace, but Kavenagh’s gentle performance shows us how quickly Grace begins to understand this.

The real world looms throughout. Cops looking into Claudia’s mother’s suicide talk to Grace several times, but she keeps Claudia secret, first because the idea of leaving the house is terrifying for her (almost the first thing she says to Grace is “If they know I’m here they’ll take me away”) and because Grace wants to keep this little world, and the relationship growing within it, for herself. When the fairytale is punctured it’s traumatic, but it also brings the girls together in a lovely final moment that is at once uncertain and hopeful. 

I’ve been using words like tender, intimate and fairytale to describe My First Summer, but that’s not to say that it’s purely lightweight. There is darkness and emotional pull in Claudia’s shell-shocked response to her mother’s suicide. In one brief sequence, Claudia sees her mother, first as she remembers her and then as she last saw her; soaking wet and going to her death. This is one of a few moments that bring to the surface Maiah Stewardson’s portrayal of that initial emotional disconnect and a more enduring survivor's guilt.

Overall, this is a very promising debut from Katie Found, it has that hazy feel of a memory of a teenage summer, but the mixed emotions provoked by the story and performances always remain in focus.

★★★★

Let It Snow

Dir: Luke Snellin

It’s Christmas Eve in small-town middle America and there’s a snowstorm. A group of teenagers are each going through their own relationship troubles, before coming together at a Christmas party at the local Waffle Town.

Let it Snow is a simple film. On the surface, it resembles nothing more than Garry Marshall’s saccharine multi-stranded holiday movies, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve and Mother’s Day, recast almost entirely with teens. Happily, it’s a bit better than that outward similarity might suggest.

The various storylines break little new ground. There’s Tobin (Mitchell Hope) the nice guy who has realised he’s in love with Angie (Kiernan Shipka), the girl who has been his best friend since they were little kids, but she might be into JP (Matthew Noszka). Julie (Isabela Merced) has got into Columbia, but can’t decide whether to go because her mother (Andrea de Oliveira) is very sick, she winds up meeting and hanging out with Stuart (Shamiek Moore), a pop star passing through town. Dorrie (Liv Hewson) is working at the Waffle Town when the girl she’s been trying to message (Anna Akana as Tegan) comes in, but brushes Dorrie off in front of her friends. Dorrie’s old friend Addie (Odeya Rush) is paranoid that her boyfriend is cheating on her, which causes an argument between her and Dorrie, and leads Addie to find help in the form of an odd local character (Joan Cusack). Keon (Jacob Batalon) is just hoping that a prominent DJ will drop in on his set at the party. These stories all go much the way you’d expect. That said, there are some welcome elements here.

The young cast is full of talented and charismatic players. Isabela Merced (previously known as Isabela Moner, she changed her name a few months ago) has had a great year already, bringing unexpected heart to Instant Family and turning in a wonderfully high energy performance as Dora the Explorer, in what is still one of the most pleasant surprises of the year in movies. She has less to work with as Julie, but she makes the cliché dilemma her characters is in play and her connection with Shamiek Moore works well, especially in the scene when Stuart offers her help, and it doesn’t go the way he expects. In that moment, Merced does manage to square the circle of showing that Julie likes this guy, in the same moment that she’s a little insulted by his offer. 

The other main story is even more by the numbers. There are some charming moments between Tobin and The Duke (Angie’s nickname, because she was always ‘one of the guys’ as a kid), few more so than when they, along with JP, are in a church, Tobin starts playing the organ, and he and Angie sing The Whole of the Moon together. Kiernan Shipka and Matthew Noszka are both obviously having fun, and they have a dynamic you can easily buy as longtime friends. Yet, despite this, it’s hard to deny what Tobin appears to see: The Duke has much more chemistry with JP. It’s a nice touch that the film never undermines JP’s status as a very decent dude, but this also makes the inevitable ending of their storyline even harder to swallow.

Perhaps the most effective strand belongs to Dorrie. It’s refreshing to see an LGBT love story represented in a mainstream Christmas movie and simply treated as part of the fabric of the characters lives, rather than something novel or, worse, shameful. Liv Hewson’s earnest but open performance is winning in its awkwardness, especially when Dorrie presents Tegan with a ‘Quaffle waffle’. They’re soon going to be seen in Bombshell and on this basis I’m looking forward to seeing them in what’s sure to be a very different register.

Other characters are inevitably a bit short-changed, given that the film has to pack everything into just 93 minutes including the credits. While it’s nice to see one of the strands revolving more around friendship than romance, Odeya Rush’s storyline feels marooned in the more interesting and novel story between Dorrie and Tegan. Jacob Batalon doesn’t stray far from the persona he’s established in his two Spider-Man films, but he’s still got nice comic timing.

Beyond the romance between Dorrie and Tegan, Let it Snow is refreshing in its diversity. The group of friends includes White, Black and Latinx characters as well as a non-binary actor in Hewson. The film doesn’t force this as a message, instead it simply looks to reflect what the modern world looks like. Unfortunately not much else about it is particularly novel. This is particularly disappointing given that British comedian Laura Solon is on the writing team. Solon’s Radio 4 character based sketch show, Talking and Not Talking was at times gloriously weird, and I wish more of that sheer strangeness had been translated here. Only Joan Cusack’s recurring cameo as a snowplough driver who dresses in tinfoil and refuses to say why captures any of Solon’s more off the wall tendencies. It gets a couple of laughs, but it’s these unexpected moments the picture could use more of.

There are charming moments here, and the inclusiveness is welcome and commendable, but the talented cast are underutilised and that means there is a pervasive feeling of unfulfilled promise to Let it Snow, passingly fun as it is.  

★★½

From the Archives: Celine Sciamma's Coming of Age Trilogy

As a critic and as an obsessive film lover, I'm always on the lookout for new talent both in front of and behind the camera. While the past decade or so has thrown up many great new filmmakers, for my money one of the most interesting is Celine Sciamma. With her first three films as a director and two screenplays, Being 17 and My Life as a Courgette, directed by André Téchiné and Claude Barras respectively, she has stuck resolutely to coming of age themes, but always found something fresh to say with each film.

In this series I'll be republishing some of my old reviews (with edits or additions where I feel they're needed) and I thought, with Sciamma's newest film - a step away from coming of age cinema - now finished, it would be a good time to look back at her remarkable first three films.

Water Lilies

There is something about the way that Europe does films about teenagers, perhaps it's a lack of that quintessentially American optimism, but Europe's teen movies seem to be gritter, more downbeat, and for my money more reflective of what being a teenager tends to be like. Celine Sciamma's debut is a good example, it's a low key story about 14 year old Marie (Pauline Acquart) and her crush on Floriane (Adele Haenel), the star of the local synchronised swimming team. It's a film about unrequited feelings, and about the confusion and pain they provoke.

Sciamma's screenplay is smartly written; intimate and realistic, unafraid to deal with the shallowness and petty cruelties of which teenagers are capable, especially in the way Marie shuts out her awkward friend Anne (Louise Blachere) - whose own crush on Floriane's sometime boyfriend complicates the relationships further. The centre of the film is the relationship between Floriane and Marie, and the clear imbalance in it. It's obvious that Floriane knows how Marie feels about her, perhaps to a greater degree than Marie does, and she uses it to her perceived advantage. In one very difficult scene Floriane asks a very intimate favor of Marie, so that she can have sex with her boyfriend without him knowing that it is her first time.

While the LGBTQ representation is important and clearly makes the film more personal to Sciamma, that's not to say other audiences won't identify. The film is about the dynamics of this relationship and Marie's first painful experience of being, or thinking that she's, in love and those things are not about gender. If this were an American film I suspect it would have ended with Floriane seeing the error of her ways, going to find Marie, declaring her love and kissing her in the middle of some dancefloor. There is indeed a dance floor scene here, but that's not what it's about. In one of the film's best scenes, the girls go to a club and Floriane drags Marie on to the dancefloor, dancing close, drawing her in, almost kissing her, before pulling away in a palpably painful moment. Water Lilies isn't a film about the endings we may have wished for ourselves when we were this age, it's more consistent and more true than that, and the ending Sciamma actually finds is perfect, if more ambiguous.

Celine Sciamma's direction is sensitive, drawing performances of astonishing naturalism from her young cast. Acquart is especially good, and it's a terrible shame that she's done little since (a couple of shorts, a music video and just one feature). For her part, Haenel has built on the promise shown here and in the earlier Les Diables and built a career as one of the best young character actors in European cinema. The visuals have a similar tone to Andrea Arnold's, in that they vacillate between a kitchen sink approach and a more designed and dreamlike feel. A distinctive and promising debut, it left the question of whether Sciamma could deliver on its huge promise with her next film.

★★★★★

Tomboy

Celine Sciamma made a powerful impression on me with her outstanding feature debut Water Lilies. Ever since I came out of that movie I'd been cautiously anticipating her follow up. Whenever a new director makes something as good as Water Lilies there's the question of whether they can follow it up with something equally impressive. Thankfully Tomboy was a confident, convincing affirmative to that question, and a second feature that really put its director on the map.

Like Water Lilies, Tomboy concerns itself with a girl's coming of age. Here Sciamma follows Laure (Zoé Héran), a tomboyish ten-year-old who, when asked her name by her new neighbour Lisa (Jeanne Disson), introduces herself as Mikael. 'Mikael' and Lisa become friends, and even share a first kiss, but Laure struggles to keep her secret from her new friend and from her family.

It's refreshing to see a movie these days which, while its focus is on young people, is truly adult. That quality is not defined by swearing, sex and violence, but the way in which it deals with complex and challenging issues of identity, sexuality and the process of growing up. Sciamma never talks down to the audience or moralises about its characters thoughts, feelings or choices. The film sensitively approaches any confusion about Laure/Mikael's pre-teen examination of her gender identity without making an absolute determination about her being a cisgender or trans youth. Tomboy isn't in any way politicized on this point, rather its strength is as an intimate and insightful drama about a young person trying to define themselves.

As befits a film so focused on issues of the body and identity, Tomboy often lingers in close-ups. Shooting on an adapted digital stills camera, with a very shallow depth of field, Sciamma gets right in to the personal space of her characters, especially that of Laure, her six-year-old sister Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), her neighbour, and a new, entirely male group of friends (cast from Zoé Héran's own real life group of friends).  Voyeuristic in its intimacy, intelligent compositions present a rather beautiful reality, and Sciamma squares a difficult circle in making a film that feels designed and directed, without allowing any of it to ring false or feel imposed on the actors.

As in Water Lilies, Sciamma's insight into young people coming of age through their interactions is spot on. She understands how to write kids who seem like kids. Even Laure's intelligent and somewhat wily sister (exploiting Laure's lie so that she can hang out with older kids) is written as a smart six-year-old, not as the precocious miniature adults of contemporary mainstream American cinema. Across the ensemble, there's never any sense of conscious performance, especially from the outstanding Zoé Héran and Malonn Lévana. Héran deals assuredly with a complex role, making you wonder as to how she and Sciamma talked about the character, and how her developing mind understood and approached Laure/Mikael's identity. The ease with which she shifts gears, going from unselfconsciously playing with her little sister and her parents, to being more outwardly controlled when she has to fit in with a group of boys, is remarkable. There's a great ease to the way the actors relate, a very real sense of family created between Héran, Lévana and Sophie Cattani and Mathieu Demy as their parents. The same dynamic also applies to the scenes between the children; be it the innocent first stirrings of attraction between Lisa and Mikael, or the games that the larger group of kids play. Always, there's a sense simply of Sciamma observing children being children.

Tomboy is full of memorable scenes and moments, be it the way that Jeanne visibly considers the decision of whether to expose her sister's lie when Lisa comes looking for Mikael, or the lovely scene when Jeanne cuts her sister's hair, completing her tomboy transformation. There's also much to admire in the organic growth of the friendship between Mikael and Lisa, with both charm and thematic interest in a scene in which Lisa puts make up on Mikael. 

Like Water Lilies, Tomboy packs real emotional punch, dealing in real and raw emotion. And though the performances are never overly demonstrative, you feel it all. Not quite as satisfying as her debut, Sciamma's follow-up remains one of 2011's best, that last moment of one to watch status that has since been earned and upgraded by equally insightful, well-acted coming of age movies both as a writer and a writer-director.
★★★★

Girlhood

About half an hour into Girlhood, Céline Sciamma visualises the moment that 16-year-old protagonist Marieme (Karidja Touré) finds a temporary sense of belonging. Hanging out for a few weeks with a bad girl posse led by Lady (Assa Sylla), Marieme finds herself in the group but not quite one of the gang, always off to one side while being auditioned as the potential fourth member. In a hotel room, the girls have booked for a party, Marieme lies back as the others lipsync to Rhianna's 'Diamonds'. Halfway through the song, Marieme joins them. The lipsyncing stops and the girls, united, sing out loud. At that moment they're a group that Marieme is now fully part of. A moment that Marieme herself may not consciously recognise, but it's one of many that's powerfully and cinematically communicated in Girlhood.

The film's effective title is more striking than a direct translation of the French 'Bande De Filles', but coming so soon after Richard Linklater's Oscar-winning Boyhood, it somewhat mis-advertises Marieme's story as a feminised take on that film. Both are coming of age stories, but Marieme's experience couldn't be more different from Linklater's 12 years in the life of the suburban every boy. Set in the black community of the Paris banlieues, Marieme falls in with these troublesome teens, largely to get away from a troubled home life with her younger sisters, a single mother, and an abusive older brother. Some of the narrative incidents as she drifts towards and away from the gang, and a boyfriend she has to keep secret from her brother, are familiar, but Sciamma's perceptive screenplay has a sensitive and deep understanding of growing pains, beautifully borne out by the first-time performances of her cast.

This is Sciamma's third film, and it seems to mark a growth in confidence. It still finds the writer-director tackling the subject of a young woman coming of age, but here she engages with a different community and sets aside the LGBTQ issues confronted by characters in 2008's Water Lilies and 2011's Tomboy. Girlhood retains the intimacy of the previous films, but feels like a larger and more cinematic work, right from the opening sequence of an American football game between Marieme and her friends and another local team. It's a high energy beginning, powered by the ground level visuals and the choice of Light Asylum's 'Dark Allies' on the soundtrack. It also feels like the end of a chapter of Marieme's life - one we've not seen - as the lights go out in the stadium and the title appears against a black screen, signalling a new phase. 

This idea of phases beginning and ending is key to the film, which unfolds in five acts, each bracketed with a recurring motif. Sciamma ends the first three acts with a shot of Marieme's back, showing her literally turning it on a part of her past. The last two acts make subtle shifts in this pattern, but the lighting and framing is identifiably recurrent, with the camera always settled on Marieme's face in the first frame of each new act. These progressions feel like importantly demarcated chapters in Marieme's life, as Para One's score rises and a black screen marks a definitive act break, allowing a breather from the various anxieties of adolescence and a moment for the audience to reflect on the hard road of maturation for the life unfolding before them.

Marieme's experiences with Lady and their friends Adiatou (Lindsay Karamoh) and Fily (Mariétou Touré) form the bulk of the film. Not all are positive; the girls intimidate other pupils at Marieme's school for money and there are fights between gangs, but Sciamma refrains from judging, presenting these events as part of a complex social picture. Set almost entirely within the black communities of the banlieus, racism only occasionally rears its head, but there are notable incidents. As the girls browse in the mall, a white employee keeps a not too subtle eye on Marieme, assuming she might be out to steal. It's an uncomfortable scene, one the young cast have said rings true in their own lives. 

The girls are marginalised sexually as well as racially. Early on, the excited chatter of the group walking home from the American football game slows first to a murmur then to silence as they pass a group of boys. Much later, to survive in the male-oriented world of drug dealing, Marieme largely adopts an outwardly masculine swagger, unsmiling, she has a fierce appearance that presents a tough front. We can perhaps see the roots of this presentational tactic in the way Marieme is treated by her brother Djibril (Cyril Mendy). We get a sense of the fact she's scared of him and what he might do; when Marieme notices her younger sister's physical development and urges her to hide this from Djibril. The full implications of this are never dug into, but it sets a tense tone for any scenes in the household. That tension threatens to explode in one disturbing scene after Marieme returns home from her hotel party, when Djibril hugs his sister, only to tighten his grip and begin choking her. It's easy to see how Marieme's choice in how to present herself later is a way to defuse threats like this before they arise.

Despite going to some dark places, Girlhood does find moments of levity. The girls may appear fierce when facing down another gang in an argument across the platforms of a metro station, but they're also silly, funny, immature teenagers. As much as the Diamonds singalong is about Marieme becoming fully part of the group, it's also a pure moment of escape, of girls simply being girls together. In the lighter-hearted scenes, there are even flashes of broader comedy, such as when the girls go to play crazy golf and Fily gets upset when Adiatou does better than her. 

It's rare that these moments of escape have such an uncomplicated purity to them. Sciamma allows the real world to intrude frequently, most notably when the girls, minus Lady, run into an old member of their gang, now a parent to a small child. In this interaction we get a glimpse of the likely future; that the gang will break up and the girls will almost certainly end up in some sort of depressing domesticity, replaced by a younger generation. This is something seen beginning, when Marieme - now as much a leader of the pack as Lady - has to drag her sister away from a younger gang.

Like a mixed up teen, Girlhood has many mood swings, sulky one minute and jubilant the next, but these are knitted together in a way that feels like life itself by the completely natural performances of the four girls, all of them non-actors prior to shooting. Fily and Adiatou are less defined, but Lindsay Karamoh and Mariétou Touré each have their memorable moments. Assa Sylla as Lady and  Karidja Touré as Marieme make indelible impressions. Sylla is hugely charismatic, drawing the camera with just a hard stare, and a presence and attitude that marks her out as a natural leader. Initially all front, Lady is confrontational even when she invites Marieme to join the girls on an afternoon in town, but hidden behind that pose is a vulnerability that becomes visible, the more Marieme begins to understand and imitate Lady. 

Karidja Touré has the hardest job in the film, mapping Marieme's maturation in the way her persona changes through subtle shifts of confidence; none more so than when Lady renames her 'Vic' (for Victory). Slowly 'Vic' assumes some of Lady's dominance, even fighting battles for her. At other times those internal changes are signalled by external appearance, particularly Marieme's hair. At first, her long, childlike braids are removed and her hair straightened to make her seem womanly and chic before she starts dealing drugs and changing her hair to a harder look that enables her to cope better in that environment. Toure's performance is all the more moving for the emotional details she puts into her many changes of 'costume' that are worn like a girl trying on a new identity. 

Girlhood doesn't suggest that growing up is easy, and Sciamma never tries to assure the viewer that everything is going to work out for Marieme, leaving us to make up our own minds about the ending. Karidja Touré has said that she sees Marieme going off into a successful life, but even if one were to feel as hopeful about her future, it's clear that achieving this will be far from simple. Whatever the challenges, based on what we've already seen her go through, Marieme seems ready to step up and meet them, and it's through these experiences that, when the film goes to black for the last time, it feels like she's finally found an identity with which to do just that.

★★★★★

Review: Seventeen [2017]

Dir: Monja Art

The first fiction feature from Austrian writer/director Monja Art, following several shorts and documentary features, is a personal feeling coming of age film about 17 year old Paula (Elisabeth Wabitsch), in love with her friend Charlotte (Anaelle Dézsy) from afar. However, Charlotte is in a relationship with Michael and a frustrated Paula reaches out in the direction of other friends, looking for connection.

The coming of age film about unrequited feelings is a familiar trope - much as it’s a familiar theme in most of our teen years - but Seventeen stakes out slightly different territory for itself in the way it naturally folds that story into myriad other things going on for Paula and her friends. Clearly her feelings for Charlotte are on Paula’s mind a lot, but the film still finds time to develop friendships and stories that don’t always directly affect her between the other characters in Paula’s orbit. This can mean that the film feels bitty, but the throughline of Paula’s experiences remains strong. It definitely seems that Monja Art, if she’s not relating memories from her own teen years, strongly identifies with her lead. The comes across in the clarity of both her writing, which conjures moments that are both very specific and very easy to identify with, and her direction.

Most of the visuals here are functional, well captured, but not wildly individual. However, there are some moments in which the visual storytelling is excellent and shows that Art has an eye for sharp, clear, observation. There is some excellent use of close up detail. In one sequence we see Paula and Lilly both playing with rings on their fingers, fidgeting and passing time until one of them decides that enough time has passed and they can make up over a fleeting fight. A similar moment involves feet. Paula’s French teacher asks her to go to a competition and when he gives her the list of things she needs to practice we see his feet move too close, invading her space - she steps back, but he half re-asserts, moving in again, but not quite as close. Both of these moments, and others besides, use the economy of Art’s visual language to tell us a lot about her characters in moments that don’t need to be verbalised. This is also true of fleeting fantasy sequences, like the one in which Paula imagines the class laughing at her. These moments are just a little more colour saturated, both less ‘real’ and more vivid than life - in that case a fitting depiction of a flash of anxiety.

Art draws plenty from LGBTQ coming of age films that have gone before. Paula’s attempt to forge a relationship with a boy shares much with the storyline between Elin and Johan in Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Amal, while a party scene in which Paula and Charlotte almost kiss before Charlotte pulls away and makes out with her boyfriend is redolent of the club scene in Water Lilies. Seventeen manages to stand on its own though, often thanks to the extremely unactorly performances, particularly that of Elisabeth Wabitsch as Paula. Despite the fact there is plenty of dialogue, there’s also a lot that we have to read without Paula stating it outright. The only time this doesn’t entirely work is in her choice to date a boy. Contextually it’s clear that this is more a (brief) effort to fit in than an attraction, but that comes through less in the character. However, that’s the only stumble in Wabitsch’s performance and she has many excellent moments, building to a very down to earth and realistic picture of Paula.

There are some frustrations to Seventeen. The script could perhaps have used a little tightening, but even the characters we don’t get to know that well seem rich enough to have an offscreen life. Some people may find the many loose ends left dangling to be unsatisfying, but while that’s true to some degree I also thought it chimed with the structure and the emotional content of the film. In coming of age cinema it’s not so much the end point that matters as how the characters find their way, and so it’s okay that we don’t know how every relationship here resolves. All in all, this is a strong debut from Monja Art, it would be nice to see something a little more adventurous from her in the future, but I’ll be looking for whatever that film turns out to be.

★★★½

Seventeen is now available on UK DVD from Matchbox Films.