Beach Rats | Little White Lies

Beach Rats

21 Nov 2017 / Released: 24 Nov 2017

Four shirtless men in conversation outdoors.
Four shirtless men in conversation outdoors.
3

Anticipation.

Excited to see Eliza Hittman’s follow-up to her great 2013 film It Felt Like Love.

4

Enjoyment.

The same, but different. Subtle, tragic and bracingly perceptive filmmaking.

4

In Retrospect.

A film that makes you feel for a guy with no feelings.

A Brook­lyn teen strug­gles to find his own iden­ti­ty in Eliza Hittman’s stir­ring bal­lad of sex­u­al awakening.

It’s a tremen­dous­ly dif­fi­cult thing that sec­ond-time direc­tor Eliza Hittman is doing with her affect­ing new film, Beach Rats. From the out­set, that thing ” looks like clear-eyed, unsen­ti­men­tal obser­va­tion and care­ful, char­ac­ter-dri­ven sto­ry­telling. But she also man­ages to cap­ture and pre­serve a mood by pre­sent­ing a sub­ject who stands at a cross­roads, utter­ly bewil­dered as to which path he should take.

Frankie (Har­ris Dick­in­son) is a rud­der­less bro who thinks he’s free to do what­ev­er he wants. He’s acute­ly con­scious of the fact that he’s hit a sweet spot in life that comes at the lat­ter stages of an awk­ward sex­u­al awak­en­ing. And this is a time before any­thing even close to adult respon­si­bil­i­ty hov­ers into view. Beach Rats presents the walls clos­ing in on Frankie, but the audi­ence only gets to see what those walls look like at the very last moment. Hittman lures us in with glis­ten­ing wash­board tor­sos and design­er ennui, and, with­out ever resort­ing to moral judge­ment, asks the sim­ple ques­tion over and over: hey kid, what are you doing with your life?

In Amer­i­ca, the def­i­n­i­tion of free­dom’ has become a bone of con­tention between war­ring polit­i­cal fac­tions. For some it means the abil­i­ty to do what­ev­er you want, when­ev­er you want. For oth­ers, it’s a free­dom afford­ed to the indi­vid­ual who choos­es to live with­in a sys­tem. In Beach Rats, Frankie seems to be trapped between these two dif­fer­ent visions of free­dom, unwill­ing to let go of the for­mer, and hes­i­tant to accept the latter.

This non-judge­men­tal film presents grow­ing pains as a nat­ur­al state of being. Even when Frankie is being a self­ish dick (which is pret­ty much his default set­ting), he seems con­stant­ly wary of the fact. Through detailed body lan­guage, we see his sense of self-hatred evolve, but it nev­er quite reach­es the point where a new­found impulse of respon­si­bil­i­ty takes over. He’s a teenag­er who refus­es to take hold of his life.

The film patient­ly watch­es as a Frankie flirts with girls on the beach dur­ing the day and cruis­es gay chat rooms after dark. His flu­id sex­u­al­i­ty is anoth­er mark­er of his refusal to con­form. Even with the shield of a web­cam, he lurks in the shad­ows, want­i­ng to see what he’s got com­ing to him before reveal­ing the goods he’s offer­ing to some­one else.

And yet, the film is too slip­pery and sub­tle to be sole­ly about me” cul­ture and the per­pet­u­al desire to ful­fil plea­sures of the flesh. Frankie and his pals are dri­ven by sex and drugs, and theirs is a search for the eas­i­est and most direct route to those ends. Hittman, how­ev­er, nev­er judges her char­ac­ters or scolds them for want­i­ng to numb the bore­dom of plu­ton­ic rela­tion­ships and ele­gant­ly wast­ed street slumming.

The film takes an ambiva­lent look at the locale of Brook­lyn, at once a play­ground of youth­ful iniq­ui­ty and a prison full of lost, des­per­ate souls. Idle amuse­ments are found in smoke ring com­pe­ti­tions at the local vape shop, or at a nau­ti­cal themed tech­no club. The emo­tion­al wal­lop that comes as the film ends is hefty and sur­pris­ing. It’s hard to tell whether Frankie has been wheel-spin­ning for 90 min­utes, or if he’s final­ly bro­ken through to adult­hood by reach­ing that low­est ebb.

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