The Diary of a Teenage Girl

This is a film that comes to us festooned with critical and public acclaim. Everyone seems to love it, and indeed it is extremely well made.

It’s an unusually frank and, I think, honest rite-of-passage story based on a graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner and illuminated by an amazingly good performance by the 23-year-old British actress Bel Powley, who is in practically every scene.

She plays 15-year-old Minnie, whose parents are separated and who lives with her bohemian mother, Kirsten Wiig, and mum’s charming, layabout lover, Alexander Skarsgård, in posthippy San Francisco in 1976. Minnie, an aspiring cartoonist, is desperate for love and obsessed with sex, which as the film opens she has finally experienced.

Her first words are: ‘I had sex today. Holy s**t!’ Thing is, though, the man she has just lost her virginity to is Skarsgård, and she continues to have fierce, naked sex with him almost under her mother’s nose.

Where the film is very good is in the way it shows the emotional effect this has on Minnie as she seeks to discover what kind of person she is and how to make the best of that person.

Here and throughout Powley is remarkable. She is no lanky Hollywood cutie, but a small, slightly plump, round-faced young woman with huge expressive eyes and a considerable talent for acting. As she speaks her diary into a tape recorder, every fleeting emotion is registered on her face and we can see Minnie changing as we watch.

And, boy, does she change. The shy girl with low self-esteem becomes a hedonist, hurling herself into sex with boys, girls, even strangers, and like Wiig and her friends, experimenting with booze and drugs.

I repeat: all this takes place in San Francisco 40 years ago, but it is equally applicable to today, and that’s where I have a problem with it. Skarsgård is 35, Minnie is 15, so he’s a paedophile and she’s a victim. We should empathise with her, and to an extent I did, but not all the way, because, in fact, she is not a victim but a predator, a manipulator. She instigated the whole affair; she seduced Skarsgård.

I admire the film a great deal; debutante writer/director Marielle Heller does a splendid job in both capacities, cleverly using comic animation to illustrate Minnie’s thoughts, and the acting is first-rate. But I didn’t really like any of the characters, not even Minnie, brilliant as Powley is, and therefore didn’t care what happened to them.

You could argue in Minnie’s defence that Wiig and Skarsgård are self-centred pleasure seekers who show little true affection for the girl, but even so, setting out to seduce your mother’s lover is surely quite a betrayal.

But then the film was not made for men of my age, but girls of Minnie’s age, and they may well take a very different view – although they cannot legally see it because the sex and nudity have resulted in an 18 certificate. Ironic, don’t you think?