What a girl wants
Diary of a Teenage Girl offers intimate portrait of exploding female sexuality
There’s a bit of a proxy argument that springs up in The Diary of a Teenage Girl every time a news report about Patty Hearst pops onto one of their floor-model TV sets (this is San Francisco in the ’70s, so it’s always close at hand). Her mind has been warped, goes one side, taken hostage by dastardly villains who have convinced her she wants something she doesn’t; who are we to decide exactly what it is she wants, goes the other, and maybe robbing banks is the perfect antidote to the restrictive life of an heiress?
Minnie (Bel Powley), the teenage girl of the movie’s title, isn’t exactly held hostage, at least not by anything other than the raging hormones that have her checking out other women’s breasts and licking the crotch of Iggy Pop posters. She is, though, carrying on an affair with her mother’s 35-year-old boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard), and there are a certain advantages that a two-decade head start on dealing with hormones and the emotional undercurrents of sex provide you, not the least of which is you rarely have to settle for licking posters when the mood strikes.
Diary of a Teenage Girl is too rambunctious and ambitious a thing to be contained to just one argument, or even just one relationship, but the freshest air it breathes is in the way it unabashedly dives into Minnie’s point of view on the affair, finds a space where a creep with a moustache and some decidedly juvenile flirting techniques — there’s quite a lot of shady tickling in Monroe and Minnie’s private moments — can live both as an exploitative jerk and a legitimate source of lust, love and awakening for her.
So thoroughly inside Minnie’s head that it turns her inner conversations into animated characters that walk beside her, Diary creates a superposition of truth, with pride of place given, for a welcome change, to the girl: she likes sex and this makes her feel good, despite the fact that even her equally sex-crazed friend smells something off. It’s an honest accounting of passion, which is a font of plenty of stupid, if momentarily enjoyable, behaviour.
If Minnie is too young to do anything other than drown in fleeting feelings, though, the people around her generally have fewer excuses: This is also very much a story of how horrendous people are when dealing with burgeoning female sexuality, how they try to temper and mould it into something that suits their needs. Partly this is stuff like the teenage boys Minnie carries on with, who are almost literally blown away (ahem) by her confidence and ravenousness, one of them going so far as to say her passion and desire scare him, which you can see crushes her.
More so, though, it’s the adults: If Monroe is too easily and absently turning her into someone who’s mature in ways that don’t involve sex organs, the other adults in her life are clueless. Her mother (Kristen Wiig), is living a post-hippie life, often drunk at best, and can only offer her vague assurances of her youthful “power,” more jealous of it than interested in helping Minnie figure it out; her father, a stuffy, absent academic (Christopher Meloni), seems equally resentful that women have sexual agency at all, and remains essentially ignorant that it’s something Minnie might even be doing. Minnie’s essentially alone, wisdom-wise, which makes her a disturbingly appropriate everygirl.
All of this plays out achingly well across Powley’s face and body, both of which are perfectly pitched between the baby fat of youth and the worked-in gauntness of womanhood. She has perfectly mastered a look that tries to appear knowing but betrays its own striving, and her enthusiasm and confusion ground the latter parts of the film, especially when it shades into lost-girl moralizing.
Throughout, she is a bundle of exuberance and contradiction, lost but striding forward confidently, fabulously aware of the ground she’s walking on, but oblivious to the fact she’s heading for a cliff. A real teenager, you might say.