![]() It’s a bizarre fable that seeks to shatter a number of female-related taboos, believing that women’s natural scents and fluids should be celebrated, not abhorred. Szell-like Notz, along with her hospital imprisonment and subsequent fantasies, recalls Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s celebrated short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. Helen’s infantilization at the hands of the Dr. “It would be like five men jizzing right into my mouth.” “I would love to eat a pizza like that,” she says, testing Robin. We see the sperm flying in slow motion and splashing onto the pie as Strauss’s The Blue Danube plays. In one scene, while the two are eating pizza, she tells Robin a story of five men masturbating-and then ejaculating-onto a spinach pizza, which is then served to a house of unsuspecting girls whose father just happens to be a food chemist. ![]() She imagines a plant sprouting out from her vagina, and has numerous dreams about Robin (Christoph Letkowski), her hot male nurse that she has a crush on. Notz, Helen becomes lost in her own mind, fantasizing about various sexual and drug-fueled experiences that may or may not have happened (she isn’t the most reliable narrator). Confined to her hospital bed by the sinister Dr. She wishes to have her parents meet her at the hospital at the same time, hoping that will reunite them. She’s condemned to the proctological ward of a hospital. One day, while shaving, she has an unfortunate accident, resulting in an anal fissure. Helen fantasizes about reuniting her divorced parents, telling her mother she wishes to tie them in bed together ‘til death do they part. Later in the film, the two girls swap bloody tampons, then wipe menstrual blood on each other’s face, proclaiming themselves “blood sisters.” At one point, one of Helen’s tampons gets stuck inside Corinna, so she removes it with a grill utensil, before handing the bloody tool back to her father, who subsequently uses them to flip steaks. Corinna becomes a pariah of sorts after word gets out that her first boyfriend, a heavy metal drummer, enjoys it when she takes dumps on his belly. She becomes obsessed with bodily fluids, often inserting her fingers into various orifices before licking them clean.īut Helen isn’t the only oddball in town, and she soon finds a kindred spirit in Corinna, an equally adventurous young gal. Then, when she has her prey in her clutches, she takes close-up shots of men’s orgasm faces with her cellphone while tugging them off, and then proceeds to walk all the way home with their semen on her hands. She lives and learns, emerging with her agency and self-worth.So Helen, naturally, rebels against her germ-averse, very Catholic mother and transforms herself into, as she says, “a living pussy-hygiene experiment.” She enjoys sitting on filthy public toilet seats and wiping her vagina around the rim in a circular motion, inserting vegetables-carrots, zucchinis, potatoes-into her vagina, and having her lady parts emit a “lightly bewitching odor” to attract the opposite sex. The film navigates morally complex territory that’s at times difficult to watch as Heidi gets herself into debasing sexual situations Shortland is unafraid of exposing the self-destructive tendencies of teenage girls who value themselves through the eyes of men. At the beginning of her journey, Heidi confuses sex with love. But by the end, she learns that womanhood means meeting intimacy and vulnerability face-to-face. Shortland’s eye for poetic atmosphere and Cornish’s nuanced, empathic performance create a heartrending portrait of a young woman searching for the right things in the wrong places. But underneath that veneer lives a scared and broken young girl. Like animals, they gravitate towards her angelic face and hypnotic body language. Alone in the world, Heidi’s dual nature becomes salient: she is at once an erotic force of nature and an innocent child in search of security and love. ![]() This little 2004 Australian gem gave Abbie Cornish her breakout role as Heidi, a precocious sixteen-year-old who, after succumbing to the advances of her mother’s boyfriend, leaves a toxic home environment to create a life for herself in the country. “Somersault”Ĭate Shortland’s poignant debut is one of the most criminally under-seen movies of the past decade. Here are five examples of films that dared to break the mold and show us teenage girls discovering sex - from their point of view. Where does it leave young women when the only onscreen representations they see are filtered through the male gaze? And there are even fewer that treat sex with the same abandon as male-perspective movies. The problem, though, is that there aren’t many. READ MORE: Sex and the Revolutionary Female Perspective in Marielle Heller’s ‘Diary of a Teenage Girl’Īs the “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” opens this weekend, we got to thinking about female coming-of-age films.
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