Minnie (Bel Powley) announces in the very first frames of ‘The Diary of Teenage Girl’ that she has just had sex, quickly followed by the statement: “Holy shit”. She is walking through a San Francisco park in the 1970s. She is wearing smirking smile, strutting with newfound confidence and the camera celebrates her with a low angle while the sun glistens through into the lens while Nate . This isn’t a normal way to start a film. It is fresh; it is new and it is absolutely brilliant. As Anisha Jhaveri put it, the film is “an authentic insight into a perspective grossly underrepresented in American cinema”. I think this is why I found this film so special and why it has earned itself its own blogpost away from the mass reviews I’ll be doing later.
The exploration of the teenage female sex drive is so rare – for me – to see in cinema that this film must be considered quite a challenge to the status quo (as evidenced here!). The empowerment and confidence that Minnie experiences through her sexual experiences is framed by the film without judgement. That we see the journey from her perspective is wonderfully refreshing. The teenage boy’s journey usually gets all the screen time in these circumstances and it was pleasing to see how the minor role of Ricky (Austin Lyon) played out. The most challenging aspect of the representation is the fact that Minnie is engaging in a sexual relationship with a man who is twice her age and is her mother’s boyfriend. But this subversive aspect of the narrative is treated with such sensitivity that the shock factor of ‘going-there’ is quickly overcome.
I found where the film arrived to be a bit forced and there was a number of loose ends that got tied up all too conveniently. However, this ultimately didn’t detract from the central young-female voice this film acknowledged and celebrated. This is 15 year teenage girl who is interested in sex, scared about the world and of not being loved. She wants to own everything she says and does, and is building towards true unabashed confidence. But she is 15, and she is not there yet and the world isn’t yet ready to treat her as a young woman. This is a special perspective that the film offers and needs to be seen. See this and make sure Marielle Heller writes/directs more films.
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