A queer coming-of-age story set in rural New Zealand, Paloma Schneideman’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” is a fantastic feature debut atypical of films on awkward adolescence. Unfolding during an overcast December summer in the mid-2000s, its intentional plotless-ness comes wrapped in harsh moods and distinct visual palettes, complemented by a gentle (albeit unflinching) approach to its maladjusted teen protagonist, brought to life by a fearless young actress, and by a director who makes each hefty, detailed layer of her story and setting feel natural and effortless.
Ani Palmer plays Sidney “Sid” Bookerman, a boyish 14-year-old white brunette with a pixie cut and stilted demeanor. Her last name evokes a kind of bookish isolation, though she manages to spend some quality time with her best (and seemingly only) friend, a Māori teen named Tia (Ngātai Hita), once the school year ends. The year is 2006, and Tia’s popular older brother Diggy (Poroaki Merritt-McDonald) has more friends on MSN Messenger than either of the girls can fathom. Luckily, Tia knows his password, allowing them to impersonate him and send silly messages to his contacts for a lark. For Sid, however, this sudden access to higher social rungs is a unique and complicated opportunity. As Diggy, she starts chatting with an attractive blonde girl in her class, Lana (Beatrix Rain Wolfe), who she eventually tries to befriend in person.
Sid begins spending time with the slim, model-like Lana and her hanger-on Stevie (Sophia Kirkwood Smith) — who love that Sid has unfettered access to her father’s liquor cabinet — yielding a riveting, pseudo-catfishing tale steeped not only in volatile teen self-image, but more subtly, in the numerous hierarchies that define both teenage and adult life. Sid lives in the town of Matakana with her single, sometimes-neglectful alcoholic father Leo (Noah Taylor), who wanted to be a painter but now mows the lawns of rich neighbors and visiting Auckland rich boys occupying the beachfront mansions nearby in Omaha. Tailing Lana and Stevie (who lie about their age), Sid befriends a trio of these college youngsters too, whose playfulness verges on sexually predatory.
During all this, she hides her class background from her new friends, rejects her less popular non-white bestie, and tags along to the parties of older rich kids, all while wrestling with her burgeoning sexuality. She knows she’s supposed to get with one of the boys — that’s just what you do — but in copying Lana’s style of dress, and even her piercings, she finds herself looking longingly at the female form, especially if it comes in the golden-haired variety. To complicate matters further, Sid’s older sister Adele (Tara Canton) returns home from college and attends many of the same parties along with her friend from university, the sweet American exchange student Freya (Rain Spencer), another alluring blonde who also occupies the delicate space between Sid’s desires and personal aspirations. There are girls she both wants, and wants to be, and in the process of trying to be around them, she leaves behind Tia, perhaps the only person to whom she would’ve felt comfortable expressing any of these dizzying thoughts.
Immersing us in era-appropriate hip hop tracks, Schneideman crafts a lived-in world populated by characters whose dimensions and behaviors are presented lucidly, but become hidden behind their social functions, as Sid begins to see each person as a means to an end — not unlike the way they see her in the first place. From unspoken racial dynamics, like Sid rejecting Tia in favor of her white friends, to the economic worries that become entwined with her self-image, Sid’s precarious new social position rests on a knife’s edge. However, the film’s tensions stem not from some ticking clock, but from the perceived infinitude of high school summer, where time and milieu stretch outward with no end in sight, practically threatening to preserve Sid’s most embarrassing faux pas in amber. It’s calmly terrifying.
Palmer’s conception of Sid is a wonder to behold. Although broad at the outset, with clenched hands, a hunched posture and darting glances, it grants the film a kind of hyper-nuance as the drama plays out, as the frame zeroes in on each seemingly caricatured facet before grounding it in emotional truth. It’s the kind of performance that creates a visual map to the character’s internal emotional logic, allowing you to trace each and every ill-considered decision and deception. However, the movie’s secret heart and soul is arguably Leo, Sid’s short-tempered father, whose layers the actor Taylor gradually peels back while holding him constantly over the flames of financial anxiety and deep-seated frustrations over his lot in life. He both resents and adores Sid, resulting in a meaningful unspooling of a deeply troubled relationship.
As the summer air thickens with diffused sunlight and harsh humidity, a psychological fog descends on our young protagonist. The more Sid gets what she wants (or what she thinks she wants), the more complicated her life seems to get, as it’s only a matter of time before each new friendship proves unstable or manipulative, owing to run-of-the-mill teenage selfishness that can’t help but feel, to her, like betrayal. That she feels used goes hand-in-hand with her oscillating invisibility and hyper-visibility, over which she has no situational control, which is ultimately what these delectate teen years are for figuring out. The way she’s seen, and how she perceives herself, are reflected wonderfully by Schneideman’s naturalistic camera, and by a languorous but always-purposeful edit that instills specific feelings, and is likely to prod at one’s own best and worst teenage memories in the process.
English (US) ·