Minnie has just lost her virginity to her mother’s 35-year-old boyfriend, Monroe, a couch-surfing opportunist played by Alexander Skarsgard, who walks the razor’s edge between charm and smarm with remarkable subtlety.
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It’s a story of sexual abuse, but the director Marielle Heller never depicts Minnie as only a victim. In some ways, Minnie is much more confident and outspoken than most, but she hurts as well, deep down still a child craving attention and love. Tripping on acid while experiencing sensations of elevating over Monroe’s bed, Minnie crashes down as Monroe rolls on the ground with the concern that someone is watching them. “I so related to John Hughes movies”, she said, “those movies had a big influence on me, ‘Sixteen Candles” and ‘The Breakfast Club,'” the latter of which was the first rated R movie Heller saw growing up. But indeed, Minnie does know, and she acts.
She finds much of it within her family’s wall-papered, second-floor San Francisco apartment, where she lives with her mom, Charlotte (Kristen Wiig), and little sister, Gretal (Abby Wait). It’s a remarkable work, focusing on the perspective and feelings of a young woman as she comes into own through a misguided, but influential romance with an older man. Yet Minnie barely reacts when a female classmate calls her a “slut”. Heller takes care neither to objectify nor glamorize her characters, all the better to understand them. That Minnie does, and that she emerges together with her dignity intact, is the film’s largest provocation.
It’s hard to overstate what a radical idea it is to show a teenage girl enjoying sex in a movie. The classmate she’s involved with tells her that her intensity scares him. “Can I join? Can I come in drag?” and they were nice enough to say yes.
Though it was widely celebrated at Sundance this year, Diary has had less luck with censors; England’s ratings board recently slapped it with the equivalent of an NC-17, effectively shutting out a good portion of the movie’s target audience.
Simply, it reminded her of being a teenager, and that alone was revolutionary. When Mom, referring to Hearst’s Stockholm Syndrome, asks “What kind of person falls in love with the person who kidnaps them?” she might as well be referring to Minnie’s sexual thrall to Monroe. For the first time, her sexuality is used truly against her. When she returns home, she is ready to be a child, and her mother is ready to be a parent. I was so excited about the night.
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“Diary of a Teenage Girl” hits theaters this week, and Heller already has a full dance card of hot upcoming projects. But it is as essential as food and air. Minnie aspires to become a cartoonist like Aline Kominsky, R. Crumb’s future wife, who, herself, succeeded in the male-driven comic book industry. Her mother has seen the consequences of the absence of touch, and she recognizes her role in Minnie’s behavior. It’s exactly this viewpoint that makes Monroe the thing, not Minnie, and renders the film a profoundly compassionate portrait of younger feminine sexuality moderately than a cringey “Lolita” replace. “I just felt really connected to it emotionally”.
