Girls Like Girls is a coming-of-age drama with an unusual pedigree: It’s a movie based on a song, later a popular music video and a novel by Haley Kiyoko, who’s the co-writer and director of the movie.
It’s a same-sex love story, filled with somewhat familiar tropes, but I was won over. It’s a beautiful-looking film, and its star, Maya Da Costa, is a real find.
It’s one of those romantic films set in summer, where the sun is always in the right place; the recent An Autumn Summer was another. This also shares a premise—a teenage girl with a deceased parent, living in a new place with unfamiliar relatives, who has a same-sex love story—with a couple of great indie movies: Princess Cyd and Brooklyn, Minnesota.
Maya Da Costa plays Coley, a teenager who moves to a pretty town somewhere in British Columbia, in the summer before her senior year. Her mother’s recently died, so she’s living with the father (Zach Braff) whom she barely knows. Braff, his boyishness aside, is now 51 and perfectly plausible as the father of a teenager.
Coley soon meets a new group of friends and finds herself smitten with Sonya (Myra Molloy), a popular, wealthier teenage girl. The two have a sweet romance, complicated by various factors, including the scars of the past, and Sonya’s asshole sometime boyfriend, played by Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s son Levon Hawke.
The film’s set in 2006 and is in tune with the specifics of AOL Instant Messenger, the iPod touch, and other tech of the period. One great touch is that Sonya, who’s wealthier, is using a much newer Mac computer than Coley’s late-1990s Power PC.
My one major complaint? There’s a mid-credits sequence that doesn’t just add a fun little coda, but changes the ending of the movie.
There’s another new queer movie about teenagers, which features a performer from the early-2000s (Mia Wasikowska) who you won’t believe is now playing a parent.
That movie is Leviticus, an Australian film written and directed by Adrian Chiarella. It’s a riff on It Follows, as teenagers in a small town who show signs of being gay are subjected to a curse-driven version of conversion therapy, in which a demon appears to them in the form of the person they’re attracted to.
The film’s well-acted, especially by leads Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen. But overall, I liked the metaphor more than the movie. It’s also not going to dislodge Otto Preminger’s Exodus as the best movie ever made that’s named after one of the five books of the Torah.