It Felt Like Love

Fourteen-year-old girls are mysterious creatures. No one knows this more so than Eliza Hittman, whose film It Felt Like Love was released at Sundance in 2013.

From the top there is a spareness to the visuals. As the main character, Lila, walks along the beach in pursuit of her best friend Chiara and Chiara's boyfriend, we can track her but not her surroundings.

Backgrounded by scenes of a forgotten Brooklyn, Lila and Chiara spend their time taking the bus to the beach, where they suntan (or, Lila's case, burn) and track things with their eyes. The one true excitement in their lives are their boyfriends (or, in Lila's case, the lack of one).

It's a quiet film.

It's only when Lila meets another, older boy--Sammy--that things change. With it comes a shift, a darkening, a molting. Lila begins wearing makeup and hanging around Sammy's work, begins buying groceries in another town just to say that she was in the area, just to say hi.

It Felt Like Love transforms into a fantasy. Here are the clockwork girls, here are the boys in blue, here are the fields we've come to know. Here is the song I love the most.

As the scenes begin to take on a sense of dissolution and Lila a haunted, doll-like quality, it can be difficult to tell if she is performing with us or at us. Like Degas' Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, she stands stock still when she should move, permanently adolescent until she isn't anymore.

What I love about this movie is when she does come of age, it is of her own choosing. No one--not her father, not Chiara, not Sammy--controls Lila's fate. Except Lila.

That's the hidden truth about fourteen-year-old girls that Eliza Hittman understands: that they, too, are powerful.