The Diary of a Teenage Girl

This bois­ter­ous teen sex movie by Marielle Heller is a paragon of enlight­en­ment and poise. It talks about cop­u­la­tion – or, to adopt the par­lance of the film, ​“fuck­ing,” or actu­al­ly even more apt, ​“fuckin’” – and human desire in frank but nev­er alarmist terms, accept­ing young peo­ple as sex­u­al­ly lib­er­at­ed and thought­ful beings who are able to make sage deci­sions regard­ing those with whom they decide to share a bed (or a back-seat). It doesn’t, how­ev­er, fall into the trap of mak­ing its teenagers come across as dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly mature as a way to com­ment on the juve­nile sex­u­al hang-ups of the sur­round­ing adult char­ac­ters. The beau­ty of this film is the way it strikes an hon­est bal­ance between the two.

It’s been adapt­ed from Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 graph­ic nov­el of the same name, which goes some way to explain­ing its sat­is­fy­ing loose-leaf struc­ture. The title refers to Min­nie, played with vim, vigour and an incred­i­ble throaty, nasal laugh by British actress Bel Pow­ley, who expert­ly cuts through the charis­ma and faux brava­do with small but impor­tant reminders that she real­ly is just a kid. The sto­ry is set in ​’70s San Fran­cis­co, a time where morals seemed to be at their free­wheel­ing loos­est, but the joke is that the film is clear­ly intend­ed as a reflec­tion of con­tem­po­rary times.

We open on hear­ing an anec­dote detail­ing Minnie’s first ever sex­u­al encounter, which hap­pened to be with her mother’s layabout jock boyfriend (Alexan­der Skarsgård). She intones her expe­ri­ences, her exper­i­ments, her fetish­es and her feel­ings into a micro­phone, then stash­es the tapes under her bed. That she’s leav­ing hard evi­dence for some­one to find is anath­e­ma to her cause: she wants to become an artist and realis­es that suc­cess only comes to those will­ing talk can­did­ly about their life and their emo­tions. She knows there has to be a phys­i­cal way for oth­ers to expe­ri­ence these expressions.

It’s an episod­ic can­ter through one girl’s long and wind­ing sex­u­al awak­en­ing which nev­er turns its char­ac­ters into maudlin hate fig­ures or deals in trashy stereo­types. While Min­nie always seems to hone in on the awk­ward lay, the flop­py-fringed skater who pines for her from the side­lines nev­er gets so much as a look in – there’s no set­tling for the cutesy dip­shit for this girl. Heller is also will­ing to drag Min­nie across some sur­pris­ing­ly com­bustible ter­rain, show­ing how lib­er­a­tion can open doors to what some might view as more unseem­ly activ­i­ties. This can range from ques­tion­ing the ethics of an inter gen­er­a­tional rela­tion­ship, to look­ing at the line between pros­ti­tu­tion and erot­ic mon­keyshines for cash. And yet, Heller doesn’t ever paint that dark­er side of sex as such, remain­ing laud­ably open mind­ed about its social func­tion and those who, say, chose it as a pro­fes­sion rather than a leisure pursuit.

It real­ly is hard to think of anoth­er movie quite like this, one so nat­u­ral­ly har­monised with the rugged topog­ra­phy of teenage sex­u­al­i­ty but that refus­es to set its stall as Sex Ed 101. Aside from that, it’s just a com­plete piece of film­mak­ing – no scene feels rushed or extra­ne­ous, with unob­tru­sive ani­mat­ed inserts used to visu­alise Minnie’s in-the-moment feel­ings. Every­one is thor­ough­ly on mes­sage here, though Pow­ley is the barn­storm­ing cen­tral jew­el in this gor­geous makeshift tiara of a movie.