Recent coming-of-age films featuring passionate young women have one thing in common, and that’s Bleecker Street Studios. A few months ago, there was EmilyThe perfect biography of Emily Brontë, who finds a creative interpretation of our literary hero who runs across the steppes, takes drugs and slowly finds her voice.
it is coming now Starling Girl, It’s director Laurel Parmet’s excellent, nuanced debut that chronicles the sexual awakening and startling fall of a 17-year-old girl named Jem, who enjoys expressing herself through dance in the fundamentalist Christian community of Kentucky.
Bring to life with thoughtful precision by actress Eliza Scanlen, Jem passionately seeks to love and express herself, even as she squirms about what it all means.
Scanlen was awesome and wild in the limited series sharp objects as a terrifying teenage serial killer. His Jem, by contrast, feels supernaturally in touch with both his sensuality and an overwhelming sense of guilt.
The character is bright, direct and devoted to God, but is also constantly examined within the feminine panopticon of his religious milieu.
In one of the first scenes of the movie, Jem wept bitterly, scolding himself when a friend at church tells him that his bra is showing through his shirt.
Parmet plunged into a fundamentalist community to research the film and witnessed firsthand these dynamics unfold.
Speaking to The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, Parmet said: “It was eye-opening to me how much we have in common in terms of what our cultures have taught us to believe about women’s desires, and it’s a woman’s responsibility not to seduce a man.” .
Jem quickly falls in love with Owen, a young pastor several years his senior played by Lewis Pullman, who returns to town shortly after a mission trip.
Photo by Corey Nickols/Getty Images for IMDb
In turn, the audience is as enticed as he is by his messy charm and conspiracy jokes, and a few moments later they are repelled by the clearly unacceptable imbalance of power between the two.
Jem loses his virginity to Owen and they start a secret relationship despite their spiritual conflict.
“It was important that this relationship was not reduced to an aggressive and victimized or eroticized relationship,” Scanlen told Obsessed. “These are the two stereotypes we see all the time and we wanted to avoid them.”
“Navigating these sexual scenes was an interesting process for both Lewis and me because Jem plays such an active role in her relationship,” Scanlen said. “He has representation, but at the same time he can’t understand why it’s wrong because he’s too young to understand that this is an abuse of power. It’s also true that Jem is also being harassed even though he owns an agency.”
The film illustrates these nuanced dynamics with a firm commitment to the perspective that Jem never hesitated. The joy of self-discovery and the feelings of being completely filled with love are then as palpable as her despair, followed by the release valve of salvation.
“I wanted to create something lively, intoxicating, intimate and immediate,” said Parmet. “I strived for immediacy but also for restraint, which hopefully encourages viewers to form their own conclusions about what’s going on on the screen.”
“I didn’t want to make a movie that belittled or mocked people in these communities,” Parmet said. “The movie is not blasphemy. It really is more to show the complex aspects of faith and suggest that there are many ways to connect with God. It’s about how God can live in Jem’s desires and actions.”
As if reckoning with the wrath of his own community and Owen wasn’t enough, Jem also has to contend with the annoying trait of Ben, a local freak played by Austin Abrams and interested in courting him.
Abrams delivers an incredible monologue involving farm animal excrement that should earn him some sort of reward, and in another scene, his character so disregards Jem’s plea to get away from him that Jem violently retaliates.
“During the Sundance Film Festival Q&A, I had a funny interaction with an audience and one of the audience was like, ‘Why did Jem try to strangle Ben?’ he asked.
“And I don’t know where it came from, but I said to her, ‘All the women in the room: Do you all know how it feels to be told what to do by a man when he doesn’t want to? Have you been told what to do?'”
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