Review: The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Fifteen-year-old Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) has just lost her virginity to Monroe Rutherford (Alexander Skarsgård), the 35-year-old boyfriend of her mother, Charlotte (Kristen Wiig). It is San Francisco, 1976, and the infamous Patty Hearst dominates the nightly news, sparking national conversation centering around the extent of her willingness to cooperate with her kidnappers, the left-wing terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.
No such ambiguity exists in Minnie's situation, though she will later learn that things are not always easily made black and white. It is Minnie who makes the first move, turning playful roughhousing into something far more provocative. Monroe puts up some resistance, though his admission that she gave him an erection and his gesture of placing her hand on his crotch to prove it pretty much proves his resistance was paper-thin at best. Minnie is infinitely curious and, in her recordings of her thoughts and impressions of the affair, unabashed in her enjoyment of sex.
"What's the point of living if nobody loves you, nobody sees you, nobody touches you?" Minnie muses, and her spoken craving for physical intimacy is a refreshing change of pace from the majority of films charting female adolescence and sexuality. Minnie is a wholly relatable character - she perceives herself unattractive and unworthy, she's not a girl but not yet a woman, she wants to be older than she is, she wants to love and be loved, and she seizes upon her relationship with Monroe as the key to her self-worth.
It's a tricky story to pull off, partly because all parties are vulnerable to moral judgement and partly because of its source material, Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical graphic novel of the same name. Writer-director Marielle Heller nods to Gloeckner's two-thirds prose, one-third panels and illustration accounting by animating the sketches done by budding artist Minnie, or by layering animation over the live-action frame. Some touches are more successful than others - the animated birds and flowers, for example, strike one as too Snow White for a film whose heroine idolises Aline Kominsky, the Twisted Sisters illustrator who would later wed Robert Crumb. Still, it's all of a piece with the film's overall style and tone, which mimics the stream-of-conscious thoughts and outsized emotions that take hold of Minnie, or any adolescent girl for that matter.
More impressively, Heller holds her characters accountable without confining them to being victims or victimisers. In this, she receives enormous help from Wiig, Skarsgård and especially Powley. Wiig is strong as the glamorous bohemian whose counterculture lifestyle impedes her from being an actual mother. Skarsgård's Monroe could have easily lapsed into the stereotypical leering predator, but he is rendered as someone with a go-with-the-flow attitude and slightly clueless passivity that clouds his better intentions.
The real star of the show is Powley, a 22-year-old Brit who announces herself as a major talent with her emotionally naked portrayal of Minnie. It's a marvel to observe Powley's face as it expresses every nuance of thought and feeling that roils within Minnie's mind. She's lovely and amazing and heartbreaking as the girl who turns to sex for both satisfaction and self-destruction and survives to realise her true value.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Directed by: Marielle Heller
Written by: Marielle Heller
Starring: Bel Powley, Alexander Skarsgård, Kristen Wiig, Christopher Meloni, Madeleine Waters, Margarita Levieva
