BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY – Review by Sarah Ward
As it’s intended to for Sid Bookman, the 14-year-old New Zealander at the heart of Paloma Schneideman’s hauntingly relatable debut feature, a bellybutton piercing acts as handy shorthand in Big Girls Don’t Cry. Armed with a needle and a teenager’s fortitude for self-inflicted stress to impress, the film’s protagonist punctures her own flesh. Even when the wound swiftly becomes infected, causing the popular crowd that she’s so desperately trying to befriend to snicker — while forcing Sid to wear a midriff-revealing top; this is 2006, when the titular Fergie song released — her new navel jewellery is an evident source of pride. Kudos to Ani Palmer, also working on her first feature, for conveying how the in-between stage that is adolescence is a whirlwind of yearning, trying, searching, striving and flailing, as well as salvaging, and not just when her character is taking the homemade route on body art. Dwelling in the waves of conflicting emotions that lap at every not-yet-adult is what makes this Sundance-premiering, Biarritz Film Festival Nouvelle Vagues Grand Prix-winning gem so potent; off- and on-screen, Schneideman and Palmer couldn’t be more committed to that aim, or more capable at pulling it off.
Committed also describes Sid, who wants nothing more than for Lana (Beatrix Wolfe, another newcomer) and Stevie (Sophia Kirkwood Smith, a fellow big-screen first-timer) to like her — or permit her to spend the summer break by their side on the beach of Ōmaha on Aotearoa’s north island. That’s the story she’s spinning to the world and often believing herself, at least, while actually following the queer stirrings that she isn’t ready to express openly. Masturbating to the scantily clad models flanking Chingy on the poster adorning her wall, studying porno-mag photoshoots, pretending to be her best friend Tia’s (Ngataitangirua Hita, Te NGz) older brother Diggy (Poroaki Merritt-McDonald, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters) on MSN Messenger to flirt with Lana online: this is the Sid of private moments only. After pilfering one of her university-aged sister Adele’s (Tara Canton, Please Don’t Break Anything) drinks and then raiding her dad Leo’s (Noah Taylor, So Long, Marianne) alcohol stocks for an in with her crush’s clique, the Sid outside the safety of her bedroom is shotgunning beers and bragging about her made-up sexual prowess with boys, all to attempt to prove that she belongs.
In frames heaving with intimacy, and also the intensity of being hopeful, excited, uncertain and awkward in tandem — so, the standard teen status quo — Big Girls Don’t Cry’s love of shallow-focus imagery offers another revealing form of shorthand. With a dreamy-leaning visual approach, writer/director Schneideman and cinematographer Maria Ines Manchego (Caterpillar) deftly demonstrate how easy it is for Sid to hone in only on the minutiae she has decided matters at any particular instant, allowing everything else around her to dissipate in a haze. She doesn’t always solely see the fantasy life she’s chasing, but she’s often happy letting the bigger picture escape her. That’s Sid’s overall journey through much of the narrative, in fact, as she ditches her sensible and caring lifelong BFF for the vacuous new pals who shower barely concealed insults at her, plus the group of rich-kid Auckland blow-ins, all guys, hosting plenty of vacation shindigs. Big Girls Don’t Cry is unflinching in depicting the toxicity and pressure its high schoolers and college students must wade through, but also clear-eyed-enough to know that the film is simply mirroring reality. The dial-up modem screeches, Paul Frank faceplates for Nokia phones, Von Dutch caps and Messenger alert melodies aren’t the only like-you’re-there details (especially if you once were) on display.
Harking back to a unique time and place, while also capturing a universal feeling: as Schneideman very loosely takes cues her own experiences at Sid’s age, that’s another of Big Girls Don’t Cry’s achievements. This is a movie that lives and breathes an endless-summer vibe — the sensation that the holidays will last forever, absent of any real responsibilities or restrictions, aided by Cushla Dillon (The Mountain) and Chia-Chi Hsu’s (Crocodile) intuitive editing — but also understands the heightened urgency that accompanies everyday teenage woes, where everything adopts a life-altering, world-changing, do-or-die tenor. It’s within this oh-so-carefully cultivated clash of moods that The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Rain Spencer, playing Adele’s on-exchange American friend Freya, has a significant impact. While not every IRL adolescent meets a slightly older, definitely wiser, kind-but-still-flawed person who genuinely sees them as they are, not as they’re endeavouring to mould themselves to be, there’s such a groundedness to the part and to Spencer’s performance. She is well-aware, as the script needs her to be, that Freya’s real gift to Sid is showing her that it’s better to be her messy self than cosplay as someone she’s not.
Learning who you are and what you want is as much about gleaning who you aren’t and what you don’t like, of course, a truth that this observant film wholeheartedly internalises. That Big Girls Don’t Cry was initially conceived as a short mightn’t come as a surprise, but nor will the weight and substance that sparked Jane Campion, who executive produces, to suggest that it could be expanded into a feature (Schneideman was involved in film intensive A Wave in the Ocean under the Oscar-winner and Top of the Lake producer Philippa Campbell’s guidance). Spencer, like the also first-rate Taylor, earn the same executive-producer credits; in front of the camera, the movie wouldn’t be the same without them. Nearing four decades since he portrayed an awkward teen himself in The Year My Voice Broke and its sequel Flirting, and fresh from a stint as another chaotic father in exceptional Australian TV series Thou Shalt Not Steal, Taylor delights. As a single parent stuck doing garden maintenance to support his daughters instead of being an artist, and short-tempered about that situation plus virtually everything else, he too provides a reminder that much of adulthood means compromising — but some facets of who we are remain non-negotiable.
All coming-of-age narratives are stories of revelations and realisations; Big Girls Don’t Cry is a picture of discovery beyond its plot, however. Its greatest: both Schneideman and Palmer. The confidence that, as Sid, the film’s lead is so heartbreakingly adept at struggling with? Excelling at crafting a personal, thoughtful, distinctive and almost disarmingly recognisable portrait of turn-of-the-century youth, her director exhibits exactly that assurance. Once more, specific scenes and flourishes assist in illustrating how and why Schneideman and Palmer each make an unforgettable debut, and equally sum up the power of this movie. Possessing an eye for helping the ordinary seem extraordinary, to match her protagonist’s inner state, Schneideman’s feature peers at Sid early, sat in the backseat of her sister’s car on the way to Ōmaha. Looking on from the front, it spies Palmer wedged between the scenery rushing by outside the window and the outer edge of Spencer in the foreground — and it notices how thrilled Sid is, and how nervous and awed at the possibilities as well. Later, in a traumatic encounter by a fireplace, Big Girls Don’t Cry paints confusion and pain with reflected light and shadows across Palmer’s face, too. Sid is type of mid-00s teen to hop into sex chat rooms rather than keep a diary but, again and again, Palmer’s unguarded performance and Schneideman’s sensitive scripting and helming make watching the character’s plight the equivalent of gazing that deeply into her heart and soul.
