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Awkward, lonely, and often playing the third wheel, Lila is determined to emulate the sexual exploits of her more experienced best friend. She fixates on a tough older guy who will 'sleep with anyone' and tries to insert herself into his world, putting herself in a dangerously vulnerable situation.
Rarely has the zone between girlhood and womanhood been captured with such urgent honesty than in Eliza Hittman's superb teen drama "It Felt Like Love."
First-time feature filmmaker Hittman, working with the talented DP Sean Porter, has a natural way with visuals that communicates the curiosity running rabid through the blood of summer-idle teenagers.
It Felt Like Love is Hittman's first credited feature, and when it begins to slow, one can tell that she is perhaps still navigating the transition from short to full-length.
Hittman draws attention to the pervasive cultural forces (rap music, Internet pornography, suggestive dancing on TV) that present young girls as sexual objects, making the scenes of exploitation seem sadly inevitable.
Gorgeously shot in Brooklyn's beachfront neighborhoods and devoid of easy sentimentality, "It Felt Like Love" features realistic performances all around, understandable given the cast of mostly first-time actors.
Hittman wraps her pointed agenda in a deceptively lovely tone poem about adolescence and summer, almost impressionistic in its evocation of the raging hormones of the teenage years.
It's easy to be seduced by the loosely observational vibe of the movie, even as its tale of a shrinking violet struggling not to be a late bloomer fails to strike more than a single note of dismay.
In Gina Piersanti, also making her feature debut, Hittman has found the perfect actress to portray the difficult undertaking of growing up, or at least trying to.