MOVIE REVIEW: It Felt Like Love

Erron’s Grade: C+

Target Audience: 

Fans of independent cinema; viewers interested in stories dealing with teenage sexuality and adolescent relationships; stories that deal with coming-of-age; female-centric storytelling

Plot Synopsis:

From the film’s official site: “In this unflinchingly honest and refreshingly unsentimental coming-of-age story, 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti, in a remarkable debut) spends a languid South Brooklyn summer playing third wheel to her promiscuous friend Chiara and Chiara’s boyfriend Patrick. Eager for her own sexual awakening, Lila gamely decides to pursue the older, thuggish Sammy, rumored to sleep with anyone. But as Lila’s overt advances unmask her inexperience and quiet desperation, she’s quickly pushed into frightening and unwelcome new territory.” 

Erron’s Review:

Filmmaker Eliza Hittman, who both wrote and directed It Felt Like Love, does a solid job of establishing a very specific place and time.  The time of the story is protagonist Lila’s foray into adult sexuality during one particularly indolent summer.  The place of the film is the homes, beaches and streets of the Gravesend neighborhood of South Brooklyn.  Hittman’s style of filmmaking—extensively utilizing handheld camerawork and close-up single shots—is strongly grounded in the documentary styling of Cinema Verite.  This technique creates immediacy and a distinct voyeuristic sensation for the viewer which serves the storytelling in It Felt Like Love well.

It Felt Like Love spends a good deal of its screen time depicting Lila as she both interacts with and watches her older friend Chiara with a trademark teenage mixture of fascination, envy and calculation.  We observe Lila attempting to express her own sexual being, while being constrained by the relationships with others who fail to recognize or address her burgeoning sexuality.  As Lila attempts to ingratiate herself into Sammy’s (Ronen Rubinstein) world, the seemingly nonchalant choices she makes are increasingly irresponsible.  From drinking, smoking pot, boasting about her potential interest in working in pornography, to climbing into bed undressed next to an unconscious Sammy, Lila abandons caution and mimics what she perceives to be sexually appropriate behavior.  What the film does well is allow its audience time to absorb the people and places of Gravesend alongside Lila’s seemingly limited choices for becoming as sexually active as her peers.  There is a real verisimilitude to the way in which Hittman has captured the awkward cadences of teen conversation, how they communicate via texting and the various machinations by which adolescents attempt to enter the lives of those whom they desire and/or desire to be with.  

Where the film falters is in its ability to make us invest in its characters and care about their choices.  I admit my own limitations as a middle-aged male to find a personal connection to Lila’s journey.  I wish, however more dialogue was devoted to Lila expressing the conflicting emotions inside of her.  Instead, we are treated to repeated scenes of Gina Piersanti’s face in close up as she scowls and takes in her surroundings with a pouting detachment that is no doubt authentic to the early-teen set, but it’s no substitute for words.  It’s not that Piersanti’s performance is lacking—if anything it is spot on.  However, as the film reaches its dénouement, I couldn’t help but feeling the haphazard way these teenagers entered and left each other’s’ orbits—and the sometimes extreme choices they made in the process—were handled all too superficially.  I guess Hittman might argue that this superficiality about such significant matters is the entire point of her story.  I just wish more had been done to let the audience see into the psyches of these young people.

I would be remiss if I didn’t address the more graphic sexual elements of the film.  I am not going to chronicle them here in detail, other than to say that they exist in small quantity and are appropriately disturbing.  I would not characterize Hittman’s choices as irresponsible, but would caution viewers that a few select scenes—specifically those in which Lila is “interacting with” Sammy and his two male friends—aren’t (and shouldn’t be) easy to watch.  It’s one thing to think about these types of things happening between a fourteen year-old girl and three adult males—it’s an altogether different matter seeing them graphically depicted onscreen.  For these reasons, I was appreciative of entering the Gravesend world inhabited by Lila and her peers.  It was a singular world, effectively portrayed by the filmmakers.  But it’s not necessarily a world I care to reenter any time soon.