Review of The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) by Hannah B — 23 Jun 2016

I'm still processing how I feel about this film; it's a difficult thing to make a movie about the budding female sexuality of a young woman that honors her experience without exploiting and objectifying her and succumbing to the "sexy teen girl" tropes that can plague visual narratives of this nature.

The animated sequences and the movie-long plug for Aline Kominsky is appreciated and lightens up the film. Perhaps the whimsical tone is what made it difficult for me to like it at first considering that the main character engages in a sexual relationship with her mother's boyfriend. It seemed like the film made light of the predatory nature of this relationship, but by the end there actually was a progression and a more nuanced depiction of the situation.