‘It Felt Like Love’ (or Something): One High School Girl’s Sexual Exploration

Films that focus on a 14- or 15-year-old seeking out sexual experience are not unusual, but ones that do so from a female perspective are. The Norwegian movie Turn Me On, Dammit!, written and directed by a woman, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, featured a teenage protagonist who wanted sex, but the actress who played her was a young adult, not a kid, so laughing at her scenes of lust gone awry was easy. For a film as powerful and unsettling as writer-director Eliza Hittman’s first feature, It Felt Like Love, which will soon have a theatrical run after playing at the Sundance NEXT section in 2013, we have to go back more than 25 years to David Leland’s Wish You Were Here with the magnificent Emily Lloyd in the lead as a girl who both longs for and is eventually undone by sex.

Hittman’s film focuses on one girl growing up in an unhip section of Brooklyn (though as in Girls, it’s the alternative universe version of Brooklyn where hardly any people of color reside). Lila (hauntingly embodied by Gina Piersanti, just 14 at the time the film was shot) spends the summer hanging out with her friend Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni) and the latest in Chiara’s succession of boyfriends, Patrick (Jesse Cordasco). Lila’s pale, open face, often shot in close-up, with her bud-like mouth and dark eyes, thickly lined in black is reminiscent of the 60s supermodel Penelope Tree with dense bangs that cover her forehead along with long, luxuriant hair that brings to mind the other “dolly bird” actresses and models of that era. But for the same random reasons (which never last beyond graduation) many of us remember from our own high school years, well-tanned Chiara with her bikini and short shorts and skirts is the one who receives all the attention from boys, while Lila sits on the beach, in a one-piece bathing suit that’s a little too big for her, her face covered in zinc oxide.

In one early scene Chiara’s boyfriend Patrick breaks into an empty house that he invites the girls into and pilfers a cheap-looking “promise” ring from a music box as Lila watches. He puts his finger to his lips, the same gesture he makes when Chiara shows the ring Patrick “got” for her to Lila. And as close as Lila is to Chiara (she dyes her hair an identical color to her friend’s and in one scene Chiara asks Lila to look under her skirt to check and see if “there’s anything there” on her itchy vulva) Lila never tells Chiara Patrick’s secret.

Patrick’s presumptuousness–and Lila’s response to it–is a precursor for the relationships (if one can call them that) which Lila develops with the boys she meets at the beach and parties, who all resemble Patrick, with their slim, hairless but muscular bare torsos (often the subject of close-ups, in Sean Porter’s striking and expert cinematography) they are all about the same height and have similar, unflattering, short haircuts. They reminded me of the one boy the girls who appointed themselves the leaders in such matters determined was the “cute guy” in my seventh-grade gym class. He was inarticulate, not smart and not even good-looking by most measures, but seemed the kind of boy girls were supposed to like, as opposed to the scrawnier (or tubbier), soft-faced ones we girls could actually talk to. Lila readily buys into the peer-determined standard of attractiveness: the middle-school neighbor boy she hangs out with and “confides” mostly lies to is just a friend. The barely verbal, college boy with the tattoo winding around his shoulder whom she sees at the beach (and of whom Chiara says, “He’d fuck anything”) Sammy (Ronen Rubinstein) is the boy she pursues.

The problem is: she hasn’t even been introduced to or talked to him. And because Lila is at the very beginning of forming her own identity, and Sammy barely acknowledges her–as either a pretty girl or just a person–neither of them have anything to say to one another. Even when she visits his workplace he continues to merely tolerate her company as her machinations to spend time with him (and to try to make him want to spend time with her) become progressively more desperate.

Some of these scenes we watch like they are part of a horror movie, wanting to say to Lila, “What are you thinking?” Lila, with all her lies (to her father, to Chiara, to her neighbor and to Sammy) never takes the audience (or anyone else) completely into her confidence, so we don’t know what she might do next–and dread seeing her do it. Besides Chiara (who does offer some limited advice and support) Lila has no female figure in her life who can help her navigate the complicated sexual landscape in which boys treat her as if she’s not there. While she listens and watches they talk shit about other girls (and even about her), look at porn and listen to hip-hop in which a man brags that “she fuck me…until she bleed cum.”  Lila’s mother is dead and her father hardly seems like someone she can talk to. We can see she wants someone to care about her comings and goings as much as she wants sex: when she texts Sammy or calls him and gets his voice mail the family dog is often her only company.

Although another world of cultural and social opportunities would be just a subway ride away for Lila, she, for the moment, is stuck in a very limited high school social sphere those of us who grew up in the suburbs will recognize.  Because Lila is so young she doesn’t realize she can escape and doesn’t find out, until too late, what the audience knows from the start, that no matter what she does to or for Sammy (or pretends to), he still won’t give a shit about her. In the same way she doesn’t know (but her father does) that Chiara’s romance with Patrick won’t last, no matter how “in love” they say they are. In the end Lila is too young to know that Sammy, if he did reciprocate her interest would have to be something of a loser himself, because she’s just a kid, yet to be formed.

 THE WRITER-DIRECTOR TALKS ABOUT THE FILM

I was able to speak by phone to Eliza Hittman (whose remarks here are edited for clarity and concision). Hittman says this film was influenced by French writer-director Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl): “There’s so much that’s provocative in her work. It explores power dynamics between women and also these views of romantic love and different types of sexual experiences that you don’t necessarily encounter in a film about young women growing up.

“Catherine Breillat is part of a movement that explores sex as hard. I think a lot of times you watch films about girls who are pursuing men and the main character is super-sexualized. What’s different about this film is, the intention of the character is the same, but in this film you don’t want to see her have the experience. She’s not ready and it’s not reciprocated. That’s uncomfortable to watch but I feel like it’s true, at least of my experience growing up.

“(Lila’s age) is when all of the pressure starts. (You are) looking for models, so you build your identity. That’s why the character dyes her hair like her friend.”

Hittman says, “The title (of the film) for me is about wanting to have a certain type of intimacy without quite knowing what it is. When you’re that age you’re always (wondering) what love is. I was listening to that song, “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” from the 60s. This character is pursuing something and not really knowing the difference between positive and negative experience.”

Although the film will have theatrical releases in New York (this Friday, March 21) and Los Angeles (on March 28) and has received good reviews, like Concussion, another well-reviewed film about a woman from a woman writer-director that was part of Sundance in 2013, it won’t play theaters in my very art-house-friendly city, but will be available on VOD. I can’t shake the feeling if the film were directed by a man, and told from the viewpoint of Sammy, it would be in more theaters. I asked Hittman to comment on distribution of women-directed, women-centered films, “I will say that it does feel like there are limited options for women telling stories about women.You get to Sundance and you have, or I had, this realization that everybody buying and selling movies is male. I think that affects the market in some way.”

You can help change this status quo by making plans to see Hittman’s disturbing, distinctive film however you can. More info, including on future screenings of the film, can be found at http://itfeltlikelove.com

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrqcUMN4s8E “]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.