"Diary of a Teenage Girl"

I just saw "Diary of a Teenage Girl". It's an excellent film, but I'm not exactly sure what to say about it.

You probably know the basic premise: Minnie, a fifteen-year-old girl living with her younger sister and divorced mother in 1970's San Francisco, has sex with her mother's boyfriend. That's not a spoiler, because that part is set up in the first five minutes of the movie. The rest of it is what happens after.

Part of what I like about the movie is all the things it isn't:

• It's not a drama about victimization. Minnie is underage, so as viewers we might expect her to be exploited by the boyfriend in a movie about the abuses of adult power. But no. Minnie is a strong character and an independent agent. Some of her choices are bad ones, but that can be said about all the adults around her too.
• It's not a romance. Yes, there is plenty of sex (shown in a way that is consistent with an R rating) but it's not in gauzy soft-focus. Yes, Minnie wants love, and is clear about that; but she also wants sex -- and then more sex, and right now please!
• It's not porn.
• It's not a fantasy -- I'm thinking of the kind of situation comedy where the child turns out more mature than the adults around her. For all that Minnie is an independent agent and the driving power in the movie, she's also still a kid. She plays like a kid. She cries like a kid.
• It's not a sermon. You remember those bad decisions I mentioned? None of them is handled as a sin, to be followed by repentance and redemption. They are all just stuff that happens. What makes them "bad" is not that any moral code is being violated, but just that Minnie isn't happy with the consequences. The movie is unflinching about showing a lot of behavior which -- in less skillful hands -- would have been portrayed with scowling judgment.

I think what I am saying is that Minnie seems real. And all the reviews I've read say the same thing: that this is what it is like to struggle with sexuality as a teenage girl. Certainly that's the way the movie feels to me. (Though I was never a teenage girl so what do I know?)

There are so many tropes in the movies about women's sexuality, about coming of age, about adults and teenagers, that this movie could easily have degenerated into a string of clichés. But it avoids all of them.

• Minnie wants sex, but not just as a side-effect of romance: she wants it because it is sex. And then after a while she starts to know something about sex, and to like it.
• She makes some bad decisions, but not because she is childish or innocent or blinkered: she makes them because sometimes people make bad decisions. All of us do. And then afterwards she feels creepy or weird at what she's done and decides not to do it again.
• She is an autonomous, independent agent, but not because she is really an adult playing at being a child. She's a child all right. But I haven't seen a lot of movies that show children who can make their own decisions and still look like real children. Not sure why, because real children can and do want things of their own. But adults often forget that, and so we don't see it in the movies adults make.

I think I'm repeating myself, and I'm not sure I'm really getting at the heart of what I want to say. Suffice it to say that it is a really good movie; and Bel Powley, the actress who plays Minnie, is letter-perfect as a horny fifteen-year-old. Go see it.