The director and two co-stars sat around a table, drank coffee and just talked about the relationship between Monroe and Minnie.
Advertisement
That’s a story that’s propped up hundreds of novels and movies over the years. Either way, she is a very courageous woman to share her story without feeling terrified of what others might think or say about her. For Minnie, it’s an affirmation of her burgeoning womanhood. She first auditioned by sending a video reading of the role, and, out of character, included a brief message spoken directly to the camera and microphone.
Charlotte is played by Kristen Wiig as caring and not completely oblivious; she sends Minnie off to the bar with Monroe but does become suspicious after too many longing looks between them.
But it is Powley, as the naive and lonely Minnie, with her wobbly self-image and her platform shoes, who anchors the film. She made her film, and steeled herself for hostile reactions. “My experiences weren’t Minnie’s, but I had her exact feelings”. Minnie, at times, seems as if she’s unable to see herself as a whole person but, rather, as a collection of parts that either do or don’t match up to some ideal. “Bel’s this dynamo. She just blows people’s minds”, Heller says.
“And I don’t understand teenage boys either!” he continued.
Written and directed by debut filmmaker Marielle Heller, The Diary of a Teenage Girl lives up to its enthusiastic reception at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. One is frightened by her experienced prowess in bed.
“Diary” also stars Kristen Wiig as Monroe’s girlfriend and Chris Meloni as Minnie’s father.
“We wanted to make it interesting and layered and find moments where you nearly not root for them to be together but it was important that you didn’t hate (Monroe) from the first to last scene”, Skarsgård explained to me during a press junket for the film at the Crosby Street Hotel in Manhattan.
But the film also doesn’t demonize Monroe for what he does. The character is a mess, who seems incapable of being comfortable with what he has, instead always looking for something new. “Ah, I’m just (messing) with you”.
On some level, Monroe knows that adult men aren’t supposed to sleep with teenage girls, and what Heller is interested in is just what causes that barrier to come tumbling down. All your weird thoughts aren’t weird; everyone’s having them.
The film lives in the gap between the “should do” and the “actually did”, and nowhere more than in its central relationship. (Her little sister quite correctly pegs her as a narcissist.) She wants evidence of change after her first sexual experience, taking a Polaroid of herself to see the result.
Those lessons are embedded in a movie that is of its time and that stands back from it. The cultural reference points feel dead on – “H.R. Pufnstuf” on TV, “Rocky Horror Picture Show” at the neighborhood theater, Heart’s “Dreamboat Annie” giving way to the harder riffs of Iggy Pop and Television’s “See No Evil” on the soundtrack. If you love Angela Chase, or Rory Gilmore, or Tavi Gevinson, or, I don’t know, HARRIET THE SPY, you will love Minnie Goetze, the film’s sex-obsessed, Aline Kominsky-Crumb- worshipping budding cartoonist heroine. Heller fills the screen with Minnie’s doodles and shows her stomping through a cartoon San Francisco, a colossus newly formed.
Lately, we are enjoying an embarrassment of riches with “Me, Earl and the Dying Girl”, “Infinitely Polar Bear”, “Dope” and now “The Diary of a Teenage Girl“. We’re not so very far removed from Minnie after all. “He’s an adult; he’s responsible for what happens but without being an evil man. I didn’t feel like I had this responsibility to portray all of masculinity or play the guy to represent all men in the world”.
Advertisement
Cinematographer Brandon Trost shoots the film through seeming filters of hazy sun, giving everything a deceptive nostalgic warmth. “But we never wanted it to feel like it was going into hipsterland either”.
