The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)
Directed by Marielle Heller
Minnie Goetze is a 15-year-old aspiring comic-book artist, coming of age in the haze of the 1970s in San Francisco. Insatiably curious about the world around her, Minnie is a pretty typical teenage girl. Oh, except that she’s sleeping with her mother’s boyfriend.
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20 films that influenced The Diary of a Teenage Girl
What critics say influenced The Diary of a Teenage Girl
That fits its origins as a graphic novel, and as girl-centric adaptations go, this is right up there with Ghost World and We Are the Best! (from Sweden’s Lukas and Coco Moodysson).
Like Ghost World and Persepolis before it, The Diary of a Teenage Girl’s grace in transitioning mediums is second only to its wisdom in transcending experiences.
It may sound reductive to describe The Diary of the Teenage Girl as the American Splendor of the high-school set, but the comparison is meant to be complimentary.
With a slight nod to "American Splendor" (noted cartoonist Aline Kominsky is part of a minor storyline), Heller uses animation in Cloeckner's own style to highlight Minnie's emotions and imagination.
He’s an unpremeditated predator, a spiritual cousin of the mother who deflowers her 14-year-old son in “Murmur of the Heart.”
If we get the odd movie about teenage girls and older men, they tend to be civilized, restrained affairs, often from England, such as "An Education" (2009) or, a generation back, "Wish You Were Here" (1987).
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Minnie is an aspiring cartoonist, and the film occasionally presents her thoughts as little surreal, animated reveries; even these hark back to similarly offbeat films like What If and Look Both Ways.
Nonpornographic films that showcase teenage girls’ sexual desires are few; among them are the recent An Education, as well as Smooth Talk and Thirteen.
To the filmmaker’s great credit, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” goes where “ Lolita ,” “ Smooth Talk ,” “ Thirteen ” and “ An Education ” have gone before — just to name a few — and claims it as new territory.
If we get the odd movie about teenage girls and older men, they tend to be civilized, restrained affairs, often from England, such as "An Education" (2009) or, a generation back, "Wish You Were Here" (1987).
"Diary" is not the first thoughtful, challenging movie about sex between a young woman and a much older man -- "An Education" and "Smooth Talk" are worth seeking out -- but what sets it apart is artistry, how Minnie's desire to be an artist drives her and how that drives how the movie is made.
We’ve seen this "way-too-young girl with an older man" scenario many times before, in Lone Scherfig’s An Education, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, and countless other films.
Other movies with similar subject matter (like Andrea Arnold’s wonderful Fish Tank ) build to this kind of encounter with slow, dread-inducing inevitability; in Diary, it happens with surprising speed and directness.
We’ve seen this "way-too-young girl with an older man" scenario many times before, in Lone Scherfig’s An Education, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, and countless other films.
(Besides American Splendor, another companion film would be Andrea Arnold's blistering 2009 drama Fish Tank, which also involves a teenage girl entering into an affair with her mom's much older boyfriend.)
In most respects, Minnie’s coming-of-age tale is conventional…for a male protagonist (stretching back to the gauzier nostalgia of a Summer of ’42); it’s high time to explore the flip side.
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In particular “Thirteen,” written by its star Nikki Reed when she was 13 and brought to the screen with keen fidelity to the teenage experiences of many girls by Catherine Hardwicke, and “Ghost World,” Terry Zwigoff’s scathingly funny account of two female high-school “outsiders.”
I have always admired Skarsgård, especially in underrated films like "The East" and "What Maisie Knew".
Her single, hard partying mother Charlotte (Kristen Wiig) has a loose parenting style and a good looking boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård, "The East").