Sex Teen Films Young

Sex Teen Films Young
Being a teenager is hard enough, but once the hormones start raging, all bets are off. These films will help you get through it (or remember it semi-fondly).
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Risky and risqué, indie films have always been a home for bold, honest, and controversial visions of teens’ sexuality . Eliza Hittman’s “ Beach Rats ,” opening this week after bowing at Sundance in January, is another notch in the belt of the sub-genre, a sensitive and often shocking look inside the coming-of-age of a young Brooklyn teen.
Like the best of these films, it’s not all about hormones; it builds on questions about identity and desire. But that’s there too, in sensitively crafted scenes that don’t skimp on reality. Punctuated by some bad choices and an unnerving final act, “Beach Rats” embraces the full spectrum of teen sexuality, even when it’s not exactly alluring.
Here are eight indie films that engage with the subject matter in appropriately intimate ways.
While “Beach Rats” isn’t an official sequel to Hittman’s previous film, “It Felt Like Love,” the filmmaker explores similar themes and structures and both, told from seemingly opposite vantage points. Set during another languorous Brooklyn summer, Hittman’s debut follows 14-year-old Lila (a fearless Gina Piersanti), awkwardly and constantly exposed to the sexual exploits of her older friend Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni), who goes through boyfriends and experiences with the kind of ease that Lila can scarcely imagine. Lila’s desire to be, well, desirable , finds her fixating on a local boy Sammy (Ronen Rubinstein) with a reputation, whom she doggedly pursues in hopes of striking up a relationship. Lila’s emotional immaturity constantly butts up against her deep physical desires, leading her into increasingly fraught situations she’s not equipped to handle. Like “Beach Rats,” Hittman slowly spoons out important revelations, but its the smallest details that hurt — and hit — the most.
Abdellatif Kechiche’s rigorously erotic three-hour romance initially spawned Cannes walkouts before picking up the Palme d’Or, split three ways between Kechiche and his stars Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, proof of the level of dedication all three of them poured into a wild (read: maybe even nightmarish) shoot. While “Blue” earned big buzz because of the obvious — its long-form sex scenes, alternately hot and totally exhausting — that only obscures the finer points that Kechiche and his ladies put on the ill-fated romance between Adele and Emma. Hormonally speaking, it’s essential that the film opens when Exarchopoulos’ Adele is still slogging through high school, all burning desires and deep boredom, the perfect time for her to meet and fall obsessively in love with the slightly older Emma. There’s no love quite like the first, and while Adele’s awakening isn’t just about sex, but also her sexuality, that her most formative of experiences comes at the hands of another woman is simply one facet of a highly relatable love story. Sure, audiences may still flock to the film for its unbridled sex sequences, but there’s no scene more telling than Adele, stuffing her sauce-stained face full of spaghetti, bursting with new desires that have to be redirected somewhere .
Awkward, horny teens eager for sexual satisfaction are hardly underrepresented in the entertainment world — hello, sex comedies — but films that center on teenage girls and their kinkiest desires are still outliers. Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s Norwegian festival favorite doesn’t shy away from showing off just how gross, weird, and yes, horny as hell girls can be, too, all filtered through the experience of indomitable Alma (Helene Bergsholm). When the film opens, Alma’s sexual awakening is already chugging right along, though it’s about as tragically amusing as it gets, punctuated by routine calls to a phone sex line and a mother who just doesn’t get it. Alma’s life gets both worse and better when a popular peer pokes her with his penis at a casual gathering (romance!), and she refuses to let him live it down, alternately turned out and a little freaked out. Her isolation grows (turns out, high school kids are awful), but her libido won’t be tamed — a strange mix that adds up to a risky, funny feature topped off by some big truths.
Dee Rees’ lauded feature debut (based on her short of the same name) is a revelatory look inside the fraught coming-of-age of Brooklyn teen Alike (Adepero Oduye), as she conceals her sexual desires — and, in many ways, her entire identity — as outside forces push her to be honest about what she wants. That’s a hard enough concept for even the most well-adjusted of teens to face, but for Alike, trapped by a restrictive family and pushed to conceal everything from her wardrobe to her taste in music, it feels nearly impossible. Rees peppers in moments of Alike embracing her true feelings, brief flashes of freedom that hint at who she could be if she didn’t need to hide, but they also live alongside nerve-wracking reveals that drive home just how trapped she is. For Alike, her sexual awakening comes hand and hand with her personal growth, and neither will be the same by the film’s moving conclusion. She is not running, she is choosing.
David Wnendt’s 2013 German drama goes there. And also there, there, and there, right around there, over there, and down there. If there’s an orifice for leading lady Carla Juri to probe in pursuit of pleasure (and maybe even some pain), she’s going to do it. Possibly also with a vegetable. The most out-there, oh-wow coming-of-age story of the century, a movie that makes the pie-loving of “American Pie” look embarrassingly infantile and “Blue Is the Warmest Color” seem suitable for family consumption, “Wetlands” is a riot of sounds and sights that run the gamut between dreamy and nightmarish. But for all its gross-out humor, “Wetlands” also packs an emotional punch, all of it hinging on Juri’s wild-eyed work as the wholly unique Helen, on the cusp of the rest of her life (and super-horny for it).
Marielle Heller’s 2015 Sundance hit “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is not your average coming-of-age story. Based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel 2002 “The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures,” the film bravely and brazenly turns its taboo subject matter — the sexual awakening of a teenage girl — into a funny, smart, and honest story that entertains as much as it educates. Bel Powley stars as Minnie Goetze, a precocious 15-year-old muddling her way through the swinging scene of seventies-era San Francisco. Like many girls her age, Minnie is struggling to find her place in the world, a journey made all the more difficult by her seemingly unstoppable hormones. As Minnie taps into her burgeoning sexual desires, her life takes a turn — straight into the arms of Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard), her mother’s boyfriend. Heller deftly navigates questions of consent and issues of age, and Minnie makes it clear that she’s making her own decisions, even if they’re probably bad ones.
James Ponsoldt’s 2013 adaptation of the Tim Tharp novel of the same name (beautifully written for the screen by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber) has often been hailed for its sensitive depiction of addiction and its fresh spin on the classic teen romance, but it also takes on sexual awakening in a moving way. Inexperienced Aimee (Shailene Woodley) is seemingly no match for the confident Sutter (Miles Teller), but when the pair fall into a hazy relationship, she bravely embraces the possibility that they could have something real. Inevitably, that includes Aimee losing her virginity to Sutter, in an achingly real sequence that sees Woodley assuming control and guiding the pair into one of the most relatable and emotional love scenes in recent memory. That it also handily deals with issues of consent and doesn’t try to be salacious just for the hell of it makes it even better, and further illustrates the different ways in which both Aimee and Sutter are coming into themselves, with sexuality as just one face of that maturation.
Tucked inside Julia Ducournau’s midnight movie, a visceral, challenging, and often jaw-dropping genre feature about cannibalism, is a tasty treat of a coming-of-age tale. The film follows a young student (Garance Marillier) who discovers some uncomfortable truths about herself (and the world) when she heads off to vet school (kind of the perfect setting for a body horror film), most of them centered on her evolving relationship with meat. All kinds of meat . Initially restrained and severely buttoned up, Marillier’s Justine eventually takes a bite out of her burgeoning desires when a weirdo school tradition activates her hunger in a myriad of ways. Ostensibly a horror movie with bite, Justine’s journey from vegetarian to meat-lover also mirrors her descent into the desire for other kinds of flesh. A parable and a straightforward chiller in one bloody package.
Love all these films but wish mine made the list too -“Toe to Toe”, premiered at Sundance 2009, distributed by Strand.
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Watch and discover Features and reviews Lists From girlhood to adulthood: 6 French films about sexual awakening < Lists
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With our Teenage Kicks season celebrating movies about the joys and pains of adolescence, let’s talk about sexual awakening on screen... French-style.
As part of BFI ’s Teenage Kicks season, we teamed up with I am Dora to present a special screening of Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours (To Our Loves) on Sunday 10 August. After the screening, we held a salon in the Teenage Kicks teen bedroom installation at BFI Southbank and discussed the idea of the young femme fatale in French cinema as a construct of male directors’ fantasies, and how these depictions affect the female viewer’s sense of self.
Pialat’s film centres on 15-year-old Suzanne (a stunning performance by a very young Sandrine Bonnaire ) who – on a mission to escape her overbearing father, histrionic mother and brutish brother – embarks on a rampage of sexual adventure, working her way through partners with apparent cool abandon. As Suzanne’s transformation unfolds, audiences and those closest to her are left wondering what it is that she seeks: affection, freedom, pleasure, or a man just like her father? Maurice Pialat (who himself plays in the film as Suzanne’s father) directs a fresh-faced and inscrutable Bonnaire to give us few easy answers; here is a girl who seems to have the power of youth and beauty, but never quite finds what she’s looking for.
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In her essay to mark the Criterion DVD release of the film in 2005, critic Molly Haskell posits À nos amours as settling comfortably into a collection of iconic films exploring “the teenage girl on the cusp of sexual awakening”:
Part child, part femme fatale, innocent and dangerous in equal proportions, these schoolgirl seductresses, born to blossom under the eye of the camera, have exerted a fatal fascination for Pygmalion auteurs who seek to capture and unveil this drama of unfolding. But over the years, as one transfixing newcomer after another, barely out of braces and backpacks, embarks on the vita sexualis, we have to wonder, whose sexuality is it, exactly? Is this the way they see themselves, are these their yearnings, or is this precocious sensuality a projection of the guilty desires and fears of directors old enough to be their fathers?
To mark the occasion we’ve put together a list of six French films that play with and subtly subvert this idea of female ‘sexual awakening’ in cinema, from girlhood to adulthood.
Carl Theodor Dreyer ’s silent masterpiece focuses not on the unsteady steps into womanhood, but on the last moments of our 19-year-old heroine’s brief life. Here is a girl who eschews the pressures of gender conformity, refusing to wear women’s clothes and vowing her faith and obedience to no earthly man – only to God – and is punished severely.
While the film’s focus is firmly on Joan’s trial and persecution, critic Pauline Kael saw something else in Dreyer’s austere direction that combined stark close-ups and rapid editing to build the atmosphere of fervent oppression that leads to Joan’s torture and eventual death. For her, there was a subtle double meaning in the ‘passion’ of the title, referring both to its spiritual and subversively erotic dimension: “In [his] enlargement Joan and her persecutors are shockingly fleshly – isolated with their sweat, warts, spittle, and tears, and (as no one used makeup) with startlingly individual contours, features, and skin. No other film has so subtly linked eroticism with religious persecution.”
Séverine ( Catherine Deneuve ) is a 23-year-old woman languishing in the boredom of her bourgeois marriage. Having never been allowed to indulge in any sort of sexual experimentation in her youth, she has instead followed convention and married a handsome doctor who keeps her dripping in Yves Saint Laurent but cannot pique her sexual interest. Being unable to have a healthy sexual relationship within her marriage, she indulges in perverse fantasies of rape and sexual domination, eventually attempting to realise them by becoming a madame at a high-class brothel.
Luis Buñuel ’s exploration of Séverine’s sexuality is played out with characteristic surrealist flourish, and her true motivations remain always obscured. Critic Melissa Anderson has observed that, for Deneuve, this ultimate mystery became a calling card and the basis of the rest of her filmic output: “ Belle de Jour , more than any other film from the first decade of her career, defined what would become one of the actress’s most notorious personae: the exquisite blank slate lost in her own masochistic fantasies and onto whom all sorts of perversions could be projected.”
In Chantal Akerman ’s magnificent exploration of one woman’s need to contain her emotions in a fortress of control, she gives us a female protagonist who is a single mother, devoted housewife and afternoon prostitute. Steadfastly refusing to reduce Jeanne to an object that is the product of a seedy profession, Akerman lingers not on her afternoon visits with her male clients but instead gives meticulous detail to the time it takes for the dressing, the cooking and the cleaning that make up Jeanne’s day.
Akerman’s direction is almost reverent in its distanced respect for her heroine; she chose not to use close-ups or point-of-view shots, stating that she refused to cut “this woman in pieces”. Over three days (three hours and 21 minutes for the viewer), things start to unravel: a button is lost, the potatoes are over cooked and the coffee doesn’t taste right. As each small disaster disturbs the delicate equilibrium of 23, quai du Commerce, the film’s structure changes and the viewer is led for the first time into an encounter with a paying client during which Jeanne unexpectedly experiences an orgasm. In Jeanne’s world though, this sexual ‘awakening’ is not proof of a long dormant longing, but an unwelcome intrusion that induces a coolly murderous impulse.
In what could be a scene out of any teen movie, Catherine Breillat’s À ma sœur ! begins with two girls walking arm-in-arm talking about losing their virginity, but it soon becomes apparent that this is no American Pie . The girls could not be more different. Elena is the very epitome of youth and French beauty; her young, slim body is a site of reverence and she longs for the chase of romantic love. Anais’s body is a fortress, overweight and unkempt, and she has no such fantasies about this rite of passage. “My first time should be with nobody,” she says, “Guys are sick”.
Directing her film more like a horror than a coming-of-age drama, Breillat concerns herself with the violent and often humiliating reality of a girl’s loss of virginity. Employing real-time direction (the first scene in which Elena’s holiday love interest convinces her to have sex is 25 minutes long), she dethrones the idea that sexual awakening as a teenager is any sort of liberation. As the fallout from Elena’s loss of virginity plays out within their family, the film’s ferocious climax reveals Breillat’s preoccupation with the idea that any the ‘shame’ associated with a young woman’s sexual activity is not inherent in the act itself, but a result of the constructed lie of romantic love.
Michael Haneke’s Erika, the protagonist of The Piano Teacher , is hardly a girl on the cusp of womanhood. Instead she is a woman who has masochistically resisted the painful transition from girlhood. In her 40s, Erika ( Isabelle Huppert ) lives at home with her domineering mother, a relationship marked with dysfunctional co-dependence and embattled suffocation. From the outside she is a picture of bourgeois respectability, a well-paid and well-respected classical music teacher, whose every movement demonstrates precision and discipline. In private, Erika indulges in seedy voyeurism, visiting pornographic bookshops, spying on people having sex at drive-ins and then indulging in masochistic self-harm.
But this is not a tale of a kinky schoolteacher. Setting his film in Vienna, the birthplace of Freud, Haneke is as much interested in our fascination with Erika’s sexual deviations as he is in the deviations themselves. As Erika’s pursuit of control through sexual domination gains momentum, Haneke’s orchestration of his grim denouement leaves no one left unscathed.
Céline Sciamma ’s first two films ( Water Lilies , 2007; Tomboy , 2011) explored the myriad effects that societal conventions have on delicately forming female identities. In her third film, which opened the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes this year, 16-year-old Marieme (Karidja Touré) must navigate not only the disruptive onset of womanhood, but also the inequalities, prejudices and disadvantages of being black and living in the underprivileged ‘banlieues’ of north-western Paris. Marieme lives in a man’s world, with an abusive brother governing her unhappy home life. Her developing sexual autonomy is compromised by this patriarchal hold, as her love interest, Ishmael, initially rebuffs her advances for fear of reprisal from her brother. Taking refuge in a girl gang transforms Marieme, and her new group identity helps her to express a kind of bad girl sexuality that empowers her to consummate and then dominate her eventual relationship with Ishamel.
Dividing her film into four clearly marked sections in which Marieme changes her physical appearance to suit the different worlds (school, street, home) she must navigate, Sciamma shows the viewer how M
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