Off the back of a big win at Biarritz, Paloma Schneideman’s unmistakably New Zealand coming-of-age film has arrived to transport audiences to the lonely aching of adolescence.
Ani Palmer plays 14-year-old Sid as she stumbles through a Kiwi summer around Omaha, face pressed up against the window of adulthood, confused, self-conscious, anguished and selfish.
The promise of sex – and the threat of it too – hangs heavily, as the squeal of dial-up internet connections, The Warehouse jingle and the cans of beer, stabbed with car keys and shotgunned, drag you back 20 years.
At times you want to watch through your fingers, horror-film style, as brutally sexist teenage boys arrive from Auckland in Jeeps, stocked with beer and entitlement. At others, you laugh at the hubris and hopelessness of teenagers, at the Chingy poster, the MSN messages and the masturbation attempt that’s interrupted by a parent and a pet.
Running through it all is Sid’s struggle with her sexuality, already simmering but brought to the boil by the arrival of her sister’s American friend, Freya (played beautifully by Rain Spencer). The shots of Freya’s sunned summer skin manage to be both furtive and lingering, and evoke a gentle longing at odds with the forceful sexual demands of the boys from Auckland.
Then there’s Sid’s dad (Noah Taylor). While his daughter tries on different identities in an attempt to fit in, he does the same as he clutches at his past, grieves the loss of his youth and marriage, and works nauseatingly hard to impress Freya.
To sit in Auckland’s Civic Theatre surrounded by thousands of others but find yourself so completely transported to the lonely aching of adolescence is to have fallen under the spell of a master filmmaker.
Director Paloma Schneideman, of course, has no right to be a master. Girls Don’t Cry is her first feature film – coming after she went through an intensive film-making course under the tutelage of certified masters Jane Campion and Philippa Campbell. The movie has already won glowing reviews at Sundance, and the grand prix at the Biarritz Film Festival – Nouvelles Vagues.
But it is here in New Zealand that audiences will understand every layer and line. It has our accents, our landscapes, and our shared cultural references, so while it is a universal coming-of-age story, it also feels like an invitation to go out to the cinema and come home.
Big Girls Don’t Cry is screening around the country as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival, before being released in cinemas nationwide on October 8.
