Marielle Heller (2015)
According to an article on the University of Michigan website, Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures has been described as ‘one of the bleakest and most brilliant books ever written about growing up female’. The teenage girl in question is Minnie Goetz; she grows up in San Francisco in the 1970s (as did Phoebe Gloeckner). Although it may be unusual for a graphic novel, Gloeckner’s traumatic coming-of-age story doesn’t feel that unusual as a subject for film drama (Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank is one recent example that comes to mind). The first-time director Marielle Heller, who also wrote the screenplay for The Diary of a Teenage Girl, has made efforts – in the casting, construction and design of the film – to overcome this problem of familiarity, so that you’re at least persistently reminded of the stylised nature of her source material.
The eccentric features of Bel Powley, who plays Minnie, give her a cartoon quality. Alexander Skarsgård is Monroe, the loafer-boyfriend of Minnie’s self-styled bohemian mother Charlotte (Kirsten Wiig) and the man with whom Minnie has her first sexual experiences. Skarsgård is both tall and handsome to such an improbable extent that he can easily function as a fantasy figure; his and Powley’s naturalistic acting contrasts effectively with their emblematic looks. As its title indicates, Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel is a combination of text and image. Heller reflects this duality well enough: the dramatised action is, in effect, the pictures and Minnie’s narrative – the diary she creates in the form of tape recordings – the words. Minnie’s aspirations to becoming a comic book author and illustrator also give Marielle Heller a pretext for the animated art work that repeatedly pops up on the screen. At the start, the animation has wit and charm but it comes to seem decorative rather than integral – an increasingly spurious attempt to make Minnie’s adolescence distinctive, as well as to lighten what is, as that quote above suggests, a pretty grim story.
The first part works well. Minnie, eager to lose her virginity, thinks that she’s overweight and unattractive. It’s comical that a fifteen-year-old girl with her self-image should fantasise about Monroe – a man old enough to be her father but hot enough to make Minnie’s mother feel younger. Because you take to Bel Powley, who develops considerable emotional range over the course of the film, you can’t help being pleased that Minnie’s fantasy quickly becomes reality. As soon as it does, however, your own sense of reality kicks in. For anyone who last saw Alexander Skarsgård (as I did) in What Maisie Knew (2012), his role in Diary of a Teenage Girl is startling. I described his character in that earlier film as ‘a dream father and a big brother’ to Maisie, a little girl in need of both. This association makes Skarsgård in Teenage Girl more disturbing as a man who exploits the desires of an underage girl. What’s more, his integrity as an actor means that he resists the temptation to make Monroe nothing but a nasty sexual predator – he’s more complex than that label suggests.
Although her character is relatively thin, Kirsten Wiig is very funny – especially in the pep talk that Charlotte, unaware of what’s going on between Minnie and Monroe, gives her daughter, urging her to be more sexually self-promoting. Wiig is then appallingly funny when, after Charlotte finds out about the relationship from playing one of Minnie’s tapes, she decides that Monroe should marry her child. The main cast is strong throughout. Christopher Meloni is witty as Minnie’s pompous academic stepfather (her biological father was a short-lived relationship during Charlotte’s hippy heyday). All the other youngsters do well: Austin Lyon as a boy of Minnie’s own age who fancies her but then finds her sexual appetite too much for him; Madeleine Waters as her friend Kimmie; and Abby Wait as her half-sister Gretel.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl is very different from Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood in style, tone, and ethnic and geographical contexts. Yet there is a kind of correspondence in the narrative structure and conclusion of the two films. The heroine eventually resists various other influences, users and abusers to become her own person. Unlike her politically opinionated, superficially feminist mother, Minnie finds that she doesn’t need a man, although she doesn’t decide on being gay either. The only woman she does need is a creative role model – the real-life underground comics artist Aline Kominsky, who inspires (and encourages) Minnie’s work.
12 August 2015
