I’ll admit it: When I was planning my viewing schedule for Sundance 2016, I skipped right over Kerem Sanga’s First Girl I Loved. But I saw a friend at a party early in the fest, and she told me she had a supporting role in the film, so of course I went to see it. Thank God I did. The last time a Sundance film came out of nowhere to bowl me over like this, it was 2011’s Bellflower. Now that Sanga’s film is opening this weekend, you have the chance to see it for yourself and understand what I mean.
Its premise is relatively simple: Clif (Mateo Arias) and Anne (Dylan Gelula) are high school besties, spending all their time together stealing wine (but leaving money to pay for it), riding their bikes around their suburban LA hometown and generally being typical teenage knockabouts. Clif is also a little bit in love with Anne (because of course he is), though his feelings don’t really bubble up to the surface that often, so it’s easy to ignore—they’re too invested in the only friendship that seems to work well for them to rock the boat.
That fragile balance is put in peril as Anne realizes she has feelings for Sasha (Brianna Hildebrand), a beautiful girl from the popular crowd at school. When she invents an excuse to start spending more time with Sasha (writing a feature on her athletic prowess for the school newspaper), the tightly wound Sasha is intrigued by the free-spirited Anne as well. While their friendship crosses the line into relationship territory, everything in Anne’s life, and especially her friendship with Clif, is called into question.
As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, the plot isn’t really the film’s focus. Sanga paints his characters with such sensitivity and compassion that even when they’re making the wrong choices, perhaps even because they’re making the wrong choices, our heart goes out to them. It’s an extremely assured outing for Sanga’s sophomore effort.
It helps that he cast the movie so well. Hildebrand is excellent as Sasha, and we see immediately why Anne would fall for her. Arias takes a character who could be unlikeable and makes him an extraordinarily sympathetic figure. The supporting cast is wonderful too, from a harried Pamela Adlon, to a squirmy Jennifer Prediger, to a gently assured Cameron Esposito, to a surprisingly restrained Tim Heidecker.
But First Girl I Loved is Anne’s movie, and Dylan Gelula is—there’s no other word for it—a revelation. She doesn’t hit a false note the entire film. Her Anne isn’t puerile, or wise beyond her years, or simplistic in any way, just an utterly compelling character going through life-changing events. It’s already obvious that Gelula is going to be a huge star.
The subtlety and depth of Gelula’s acting, too, are a great match for Sanga’s textured script. Take, for example, the way Anne’s friendship with Clif changes once she tells him about Sasha. She knows that he’s wrong in his reaction, both in the moment and subsequently, but there’s a strong overtone of self-loathing there, too. Part of her has always known how Clif feels, and that, far from discouraging his feelings, she’s exploited them to deepen their friendship. This is just the way things happen in real life, especially in high school, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it treated so well in a film—and without any explicit dialogue about it, simply through Sanga giving Gelula time and space to let all those conflicting, half-understood emotions cross her remarkable face.
The other aspect of high schoolers with which Sanga plays is the musicality of their language, the misdirection and dancing around and adorning the point of a statement so as to minimize it. “Like” and “you know” and “I mean” abound—it’s a song and dance best captured in the criminally underrated 1990s television show My So-Called Life, in whose tradition First Girl I Loved directly falls. There’s a certain beauty to that language pattern, certainly a familiarity, and the ring of truth.
“What if I say the wrong thing?” a character asks in a seemingly innocuous moment near the beginning of the story. But that question lies at the heart of the characters’ concerns throughout the whole film. That kind of insecurity comes from not being comfortable saying what you feel, but more than that: from not being comfortable with what you feel in the first place—as well as what your feelings say about who you are. That’s something we all go through in high school, and in college, and in young adulthood. And I’m not sure we ever completely get over it. That’s why First Girl I Loved, for all its insight into the specific situation of a girl struggling to come out, is a universal tale: I’ve never been a gay girl, or even a gay boy, but at the stirring denouement of the film, I was crying my eyes out.
Director: Karem Sanga
Writer: Karem Sanga
Starring: Dylan Gelula, Brianna Hildebrand, Pamela Adlon, Cameron Esposito, Tim Heidecker, Mateo Arias
Release Date: October 18, 2016