Alexander Skarsgard’s movie “Diary of a teenage girl” opened the New Directors / New Films Festival in NYC last night, and following on from the reactions it received at both Sundance and Berlinale, the movie has been heaped with critical praise.
According to FilmSchoolRejects it is the “most important coming-of-age movie in years”.
When director and screenwriter Marielle Heller introduced her debut feature, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, at last night’s New Directors/New Films kickoff premiere in New York, she likened Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel to Catcher In the Rye for girls. The book, which features Gloeckner’s own original drawings and is reportedly loosely based on her own coming-of-age, making it a bit of a novel/graphic novel/autobiography hybrid, is just that seminal and that original, so it’s only fitting that Heller’s film is also an instant classic in its own right.
Heller’s film – a years-long passionate project – premiered back at Sundance in January, where it was almost instantaneously hailed as one of the best of the fest (I remember the cavalcade of tweets that clogged up my feed as soon as the film’s first screening let out, combined with the horrific panic when I realized there was no way I could make a subsequent screening of the film fit into my packed schedule) and then quickly snapped up by Sony Pictures Classics. It’s easy enough to describe the film as a coming-of-age story, but the film is deeply creative and uncomfortably honest in ways that are often missing from current coming-of-age stories. It cuts to the bone, and then it keeps going.
