The Diary of a Teenage Girl

You don’t have to be or remember being or know or parent a teenage girl to find yourself addressed by The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Its broader theme is the danger of power, especially the sexual license which the setting — San Francisco, 1976 — emblematizes. 

Young Minnie discovers both her sexual and her creative power as she’s deflowered by her mother’s boyfriend Monroe and draws cartoons in the style of (R Crumb’s wife) Aline Kominsky.  (Monroe, by the way, may be a studly ballooning of Jules Feiffer’s nebbish hero of the time, as Minnie proves a long way away from the cartoon style of Mickey and his gal.) The animation scenes show her living in a state of heightened awareness, life bursting out and into art.
Both endeavours prove dangerous. Her affair threatens her mother’s shaky security and her art-work can strike the conventional (e.g., Monroe) as freaky as her exuberant sex strikes a younger lover. Her other creative enterprise, tape recording her confessions, blows up the scene. Art and sex are avenues of self-discovery and self-realization — dangerous. Both are life-affirming but both herald the frightening responsibilities of adulthood.

Minnie is obviously the film’s central subject and consciousness. Self-conscious about her physical imperfections, she succumbs to her mother’s and Monroe’s invitations to assert her sexuality. Full credit to Bel Powley for an astonishing, shameless and vanity-free presentation.

But the other women are significant too. There’s Minnie’s “white trash — but in a good way” best friend, in whom she entrusts teen confidences but who steals a bout with Monroe herself. 

There’s the lesbian lurking in the bush who seduces Minnie only to exploit her for her own purposes. So you don’t have to be a man to exploit a trusting young girl — though Monroe demonstrates how swaggering manhood and convenient access are a huge advantage.  
     Monroe’s casual predation shows how his power can destroy him too. He knows he shouldn’t do what he does and he knows Minnie is manipulating him but he can’t control himself. He even drifts into Charlotte’s silly web to resolve the issue: Monroe must marry Minnie. He’s too easily satisfied even to realize his own small dream of a mail-order vitamin empire. Remote infusions define him. The fact that he lets himself be seduced by young Minnie shows him victim of his own passivity, a character wholly without character.

But the two other key characters are Minnie’s mother and younger sister. Charlotte was a highschool beauty, is still as beautiful and enchanting as Kirsten Wiig, surrounded by lusting lovers — and is paralyzed by that former power. She desperately clings to romance because she feels she has lost her sexual appeal and beauty. As her egotistical ex-husband Pascal insensitively declares, she can’t run her own life. We watch her drift from one stupor to the next, abandoning Minnie to Monroe and latenite TV, eventually being fired from her library job. Only the fear that her anger may have driven Minnie to suicide sobers her up sufficiently to embrace her prodigal daughter. At the end, though, Charlotte is still “seeing” Monroe, unable to escape her enslavement to her sexual liberty with him. “We can never talk about it,” she instructs Minnie, but she can’t leave the man who humiliated her either.

     Kid sister Gretel shows more hope. Without either her beautiful mother’s or her plainer sister’s looks she has to find another path to mature self-respect. With her mother’s shallowness as one model, she finds a preferable one in the new Minnie. From her she learns that she doesn’t need a man or a relationship for self-respect. The two sisters used to fight and swap bitter notes but at the end they frolic together, with an exuberance that bonds them as women, as sisters.