Shore Thing
BEACH RATS | Director Eliza Hittman talks sexual awakening…
Ilike teen movies. I like good ones and I like the bad ones!” deadpans director Eliza Hittman. Luckily, hers is the former. A seductive and sensitive portrait of a Brooklyn teen struggling to come to terms with his sexuality, Beach Rats is at once tender, tortured and terrific as its protag’s chatroom hook-ups hint at a deep and difficult denial. In ‘teen movie’ parlance, this is more Mysterious Skin than Pretty In Pink.
“I’m interested in pivotal moments of transformation and the films about youth that explore that,” says Hittman, whose feature debut, It Felt Like Love, focused on a teenage girl’s fumbled sexcapades. With Beach Rats, she follows Frankie, who she describes as the “male counterpart” to the heroine of her debut. His sojourns with older gay men are at odds with his entirely hetero friendship group, and complicated by the fact that his father is critically ill.
“He’s at a pivotal moment of transformation where he knows
he has these desires, but he’s not able to act upon them,” explains Hittman. “I was intrigued by that disconnect.” Shooting in Grave’s End and Coney Island, a stone’s throw away from her own neighbourhood, Hittman cast Brit newcomer Harris Dickinson as Frankie, having been impressed by “the vulnerability of his eyes paired with the deep voice that he hadn’t grown into yet”.
Dickinson also didn’t blush at the prospect of stripping off in a film that lays Frankie bare both emotionally and physically. “To me it’s important not to hide things from the audience and the film deals a lot with shame,” Hittman muses. “Harris was very casual about it; he understood that it was part of the language of telling the story.”
And although Beach Rats stirred mild controversy at Sundance over the fact that a woman was directing a male ‘coming out’ tale, Hittman reveals she drew from her own experiences to craft the story. “I grew up in an environment with somebody who was trying to navigate coming out and wasn’t able to do so completely,” she says. Next up, Hittman’s directing two episodes of
13 Reasons Why Season 2, a perfect fit for a director with an affinity for troubled teens.
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