The Diary of a Teenage Girl
2015 · Directed by Marielle Heller
Original language: English
- drama
- romance
- comedy
The story
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.
What it’s like
Warm, grainy 1970s San Francisco in hazy sunlight: sunbleached Victorian interiors, bell-bottoms, shag carpet, and the saturated glow of a hand-drawn comic world that flickers into animated sketches as the heroine narrates her own life. Camera work is intimate and loose, with close handheld faces and lots of mirrors, bedroom doorways and cramped apartments, while the soundtrack leans on warm period rock and jangly pop that sits under scenes like a memory. The mood is wistful, funny and uneasy by turns, a bittersweet, sun-faded melancholy that tips into discomfort rather than dread. The pace is loose and conversational, drifting through days with long pauses, and the emotional arc follows a clever, unfiltered young girl learning that her own appetites and judgments are not always her own to trust. Sexual content is frank and explicit in places, with nudity and an uncomfortable relationship with an adult at its center, and the tension comes from talk and awkwardness more than violence, which is absent. Best suited to a late-night watch or a slow rainy afternoon, for viewers who want a candid, sharply observed coming-of-age story with humor and unease, and who are comfortable with mature sexual themes.
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