‘Yes, God, Yes’ sweetly chronicles a girl’s coming of age
I remember so little about my own Catholic high school junioryear retreat, except that the religious discussions didn’t have a chance against the severity of everyone’s crushes. That’s my memory of it, anyway.
And so it goes with the sharp, clear-eyed coming-of-age comedy “Yes, God, Yes.” Written and directed by Karen Maine, who co-wrote the pungent Jenny Slate showcase “Obvious Child,” it’s based on Maine’s own experiences growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, near the end of her 12 years of Catholic school.
It is one of this summer’s worthwhile comedies: small but very sure, and guided beautifully throughout by Natalia Dyer of “Stranger Things.”
The time is 19 or 20 years ago. The first sound you hear in “Yes, God, Yes” is that horrible AOL dial-up noise. At home after school, 16-year-old Alice goes online to join a movie-trivia chat room. Abruptly she finds herself in a would-be cybersex encounter with someone posting photos of “himself ” and “his wife.”
This is perplexing new territory for a good Catholic girl, even one who is questioning things while her classmates appear fully on board with “God’s plan.”
Much of this efficiently paced story takes place on a four-day junior-year retreat. Alice brings along a load of unseen, unwanted baggage; lately she suffered some humiliating gossip regarding her alleged slutting-around with a boy who already has a girlfriend.
This is the reputation accompanying Alice on retreat, though her dreamy preoccupation with the forearms of a particular, slightly older retreat leader (Wolfgang Novogratz) takes up most of her imaginative life. Portrayed as a batch of sweet-natured contradictions by Dyer, Alice follows her curiosity where it takes her. The early era of online smut provides the backdrop in Maine’s character study. The many characters lightly but deftly sketched here, in Maine’s feature debut, have secrets to keep, mostly unsuccessfully.
The details feel precise and authentic, from the abstinenceonly posters in the school hallway to Alice and Laura’s between-classes banter at the lockers (“Have you had to watch the partial-birth-abortion video yet?,” one asks brightly). Various coming-of-age films have located their themes at the three-way intersection of religious, sex and moral education. Many of these are treated for broad comedy or hindered by dismissible, subhuman antagonists. “Yes, God, Yes” is a different, and better, sort of intersection story.
The project started out as Maine’s 11-minute 2017 short film of the same name, which also starred Dyer. Some of the lines carry over from the earlier version, notably the morality class instructor’s description of horny teenaged boys as “microwave ovens,” versus girls, the needier “conventional ovens” of the species. In several scenes, the camera stays close to Dyer’s dazzling array of expressions at the computer keyboard while Alice processes the latest rabbit hole or interior dilemma. Maine knows a pitch-perfect performance when she sees one.
The film runs a mere 73 minutes without its end credits. I could’ve used more, which is a sign of talent, not deficiency.