In introducing the Sundance screening of her stunning debut feature-length film Big Girls Don't Cry, filmmaker Paloma Schneideman said she made this queer coming-of-age tale set in rural New Zealand because movies can save people's lives.
Big Girls Don't Cry, named for the Fergie song released in 2006, when the story is set, follows Sid (Ani Palmer), a 14-year-old girl living in a small town in New Zealand, as she befriends a group of older teens, tries on several different identities, and experiences growing pains.
Throughout the film, it seems pretty clear that Sid is a lesbian and has no interest in or attraction to boys, but she also doesn't seem to know that being gay is an option. Her community has only just gotten the internet, and she spends her free time on MSN Messenger, chatting with friends and strangers. While the internet opened an infinite number of doors for people to discover themselves, Sid is still searching.
After she stares at pictures of beautiful women and masturbates to the thought of them, she still tries to hook up with and date boys. When she befriends the older girl she has a crush on (Beatrix Wolfe), she's willing to be paired up with a boy just so that she can spend time with the girl.
While trying to impress and become one of the older teens, Sid starts drinking, smoking weed, going to parties, dressing more revealingly, and flirting with boys. No matter what she tries, she still can't fit in.
When her older sister's American friend Freya (Rain Spencer) starts paying attention to her, Sid thinks she may have found her place. Freya is the first person to tell Sid she's cool—she holds the joint while Sid takes her first hit of weed, she cuddles with Sid, and tells her she's gorgeous. She even does the classic lesbian awakening move of getting up close to Sid's face and doing her makeup for the first time.
At a party, when she thinks she's found safety by going into a room alone with Freya, Sid falls asleep only to be awakened by the older girl having sex with a boy on the bed next to her.
Big Girls Don't Cry isn't always an easy watch — it unflinchingly explores the pressure teen girls are under to grow up and become sexualized for boys. While it never gets as dark as a movie like Thirteen or Kids, it certainly has scenes that some viewers may shy away from.
Growing pains are real, and in this movie, Sid experiences and causes all kinds of pain. She fights with her drunk, uncaring father (Noah Taylor), she feuds with her big sister when she brings home a friend from college, she abandons her best friend, and she even physically hurts herself, piercing her own belly button in an effort to look more grown up. But in the end, she survives. And she'll have more summers after this one.
Debut actor Ani Palmer is stunning and carries a tremendous weight in the film. She's in every scene of the movie, so there isn't a moment that doesn't hinge on her performance. Thankfully, Palmer and Schneideman's collaboration produced a performance that punches you in the gut and transports you immediately back to your gangly teen self, making you cringe as if you're watching your own awkward memories and drowning in the isolation of teen girlhood.
In another film I watched at this year's festival, the documentary Barbara Forever, legendary lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer says that she didn't know the word "lesbian" when she first heard it at age 30. While Barbara was discovering a whole new world of sexuality and possibility in the 70s, Sid faces some of the same issues as a 14-year-old who had just gotten the internet in 2006.
She hasn't seen enough of the world to know that there are possibilities other than getting with boys and being like the other girls. Sid is so obsessed with being grown up, but she hasn't even gotten her period yet. Her summer is over, and so is this experiment, but her life is just beginning.
Schneideman said that when her own small New Zealand town got its first cinema, Little Miss Sunshine was the first movie she saw, and it opened her young eyes to the idea that there was a whole world out there to explore. I'm sure there will be teens who see this movie and end up with a similar story.
Out Review: 4 out of 5 stars.
