Saturday Film Club #7: Girl

Dominque Swain and Tara Reid as Andrea and Cybil

Director: Jonathan Kahn

Country of origin and year of release: US, 1998

I would never have encountered Girl (which has the feel of a straight-to-video release) had it not been for regularly watching it's trailer on a long forgotten VHS tape. I was intrigued by the films seemingly slapstick take on the 1990s grunge scene, and the perennial teenage coming of age film structure holding it all together.

Starring a post-Lolita Dominique Swain, Girl tells the story of Andrea Marr, a fairly quiet, strait-laced much loved only child of older, very over protective parents. Undistinguished and largely unnoticed at high school, Andrea is, in short, A Geek. 

That is until she meets Todd Sparrow (Sean Patrick Flanery), singer in local grunge band The Colour Green (surely a choice that would be firmly at the bottom of anyone's band name list, but still...), and develops such a severe crush on him that it borders on stalking. Her bass playing friend Cybil (Tara Reid) is unsurprisingly cynical about Andrea's sudden transformation from geek to aspiring grunge queen, and Andrea's (admittedly boring) friend Darcy (Selma Blair) is abandoned with little thought or consequence. Andrea's entree into the local grunge scene comes from Rebecca (Summer Phoenix), a lone grunge girl in her class at school, who knows all the cool bands and all the best venues, and essentially takes the unworldly Andrea in hand. On her way to snagging the weirdly uncharismatic Todd, Andrea falls into the path of Kevin (Channon Roe), a journalism student who provides her with her first (deeply unsatisfying) sexual experience. She also meets Todd's sister, Carla (Portia de Rossi), an effortlessly cool grunge queen who tells Andrea straight up that Todd is not for her: "You're too good for him; he doesn't deserve a girl like you." 

This grunge story has its roots in a serialised story of the same name, which first appeared in Sassy magazine before being published as a novel in 1994. The book's writer, Blake Nelson, later adapted the novel for screen, during which process the previously un-academic and un-motivated Andrea suddenly became Ivy League material, giving the inevitable relationship with Todd an extra layer of built in destruction that greatly enhances the plot.

Although the book Girl was written prior to cult US coming of age series My So-Called Life, the film Girl compares unfavourably to Winnie Holtzman's series. Tara Reid's Cybil is no Rayanne Graff and Swain's Andrea Marr is no Angela Chase. And yet the film does have some genuinely funny moments: 

A post coital and confused Andrea visiting the school counsellor's office to try and make sense of her first sexual encounter with Todd Sparrow is one, as is the first gig scene, which quite rightly eschews realism for atmosphere and comes away with a clumsy sense of charm in the process. In a related note, Summer Phoenix as Rebecca gets most of the best lines, including her introductory speech in which she accurately skewers musical sub genre snobbery. 

There are some interesting performances here, including de Rossi as the effortlessly cool Carla, and the aforementioned Phoenix as Rebecca, who would have made a much more interesting lead character than Swain's Andrea. 

Swain herself has a tendency to come across as whiney at moments when the viewer is meant to feel sympathy for her, but Reid as Cybil is at least periodically interesting in her performance, and Blair as the abandoned Darcy is... OK. Sadly, pretty much all of the male characters, up to and including Todd and Kevin, feel woefully underwritten. 

It would be an interesting 'What if?' to imagine what Girl would have been like had Phoenix's Rebecca been the lead character instead of Swain's Andrea. It would have made for a very different film, especially as Rebecca would have been far less likely to put up with Kevin's pseudo intellectual music journalist bollocks, and probably would have been clear headed enough, and had enough self esteem, to stay away from Todd Sparrow. It's unlikely that Hollywood would have been interested in that story though, and the result would probably have been closer to Daria than My So-Called Life, which would have been no bad thing.