Big Girls Don't Cry

 

This review may contain spoilers!

Big Girls Don't Cry follows Sid, a fourteen-year-old girl growing up in 1990s New Zealand and trying her best to fit in socially with a crowd she aspires to be a part of. 

I found this film a very uncomfortable watch almost till the very last frame. This is really the exact point. Big Girls Don't Cry isn't here to be a coming-of-age story with a rose-tinted glasses approach and warm conclusion. This film takes our protagonist, Sid, and puts her on a truly difficult path of personal identity exploration. Across this film, Sid is exploring her own sense of self and emerging sexual desires. She stumbles through flirtatious and sexual exchanges online, even using her best friend's brother's MSN account to solicit images from other girls. Syd is incredibly isolated in her own exploration of sexual identity, though she clearly falls into the orbit of Lana, a popular girl Sid is crushing on. As she goes through this process, Sid begins to push against her own boundaries, stealing alcohol, sneaking out to parties and engaging in drug use. Her own sense of self really gets tested too. She begins changing the way she wears her clothes, looks at her hair and experiments with make-up. There's a particularly gnarly scene in which she gives herself a belly button piercing. This is a vast range of change and experience to play through, and the whole thing really hinges on Ani Palmer's quite reserved and grounded leading performance.

This is as much a story about trauma as it is a journey of self-discovery. Paloma Schneideman has crafted a narrative that points a glaring finger at the ways young girls and women are failed their entire lives. The manner through which they are hurt, exploited and abused. Sid is often chasing something in this film, but she gives up pieces of herself to do it. Sometimes the autonomy to give up those pieces isn't even there. Social pressures push her into making poor decisions in a vulnerable setting or being forced into sexual encounters that feel like a dark corner more than anything else. One of my least favourite aspects of this feature is that it decides to tell this story by just ending. There is a moment where the story concludes by simply indicating Sid's story will continue to happen and things like this will come again. It's a clear thought but doesn't lend finality very much to the film. In some ways, it left me wondering if Sid has just endured awful things and consequences, but hasn't necessarily grown beyond those moments. Big Girls Don't Cry seems afraid to end; it barely knows how to look forward, which lessened some of the weight of the feature for me.

I also struggle with this trend in films at the moment to have a cast of extremely likeable characters. That's not to say the performances are inherently bad; in fact, it's a fascinating cast. But while you believe in everyone, it's difficult to find someone to root for in this film. Palmer is acting beyond her years in this, but it doesn't change the fact that Sid can be difficult to watch at times. She makes a lot of bad decisions, acts selfishly towards others and is quite manipulative. One of the better young performances in this came from Ngataitangirua Hita, who played Tia. She was this really steady best friend role to Palmer, and you really saw something unwavering in her role's principles that I liked. Noah Taylor gave the best performance of the feature as the complicated father figure, Leo. This was a role that could be creepy at times, a bit abrasive and certainly wasn't the most present father. Yet, he also had this clear fragility to him that I admired. There's a scene near the end of the feature where he actually shows a great deal of care for his youngest daughter that really hits home. Some roles came off quite generic; Lana (Wolfe) was a bit generic as a pretty girl with a mean streak, while the untrustworthy young guys (Blackburn, Boyle and Lee) really left you on edge. I found Rain Spencer fascinating; she was both a sort of guide and a light that was fast blazing out in Sid's life. I wish Canton had gotten more of a chance to do much in her big sister role, but this often felt pushed to the back.

This was a film that might have struggled to frame dialogue scenes at times, but on the whole, it was rather beautiful. It had some amazing picturesque shots, like the Jeep driving along the surf of the beach. But it also did some pretty powerful perspective storytelling. The camera really was the eye of Sid at times: lingering, furtive glances and burning curiosity. The whole thing had a good sense of flow to it, with a pretty precise approach to the editing. There was a very transcendent score that suited moments that felt out of body and freeing perfectly. The soundtrack had a light indie party vibe that really felt true to the world Sid was tethering herself to. It's the sort of aspirational indie coming-of-age tale I haven't really seen New Zealand cinema be inventive enough to branch into before. 

It's nice to see this kind of cinematic ambition coming out of New Zealand. I would give Big Girls Don't Cry a 6.5/10.