The kids are not alright. So seems to be the argument underlying much of contemporary coming-of-age stories that have come out in the past few years. Most attempt to assert themselves as authentic dramatic assessments of today’s youth by either bluntly engaging with the core issues affecting young people or siphoning them through a softer, more accessible lens. On the one hand, you have this very specific set of glum teen melodramas like HBO’s Euphoria and Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, which crank up the volume to 11 and paint an unflattering, provocative portrait of Gen-Z as a hypersexual, hyperstimulated, hyperaware generation. On the other side of the spectrum, you have inoffensive, formulaic fluff like Netflix’s Never Have I Ever and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, whose glossy, Instagrammified visuals and algorithmic dialogue end up sanitizing the problems faced by its characters.
This frustrating feel-bad/feel-good binary representation of teenagers speaks to the difficulty in articulating the nuances and verisimilitude of adolescence from an older, outsider perspective. It’s as if the adults writing these scripts are drawing inspiration from what they think teens are like (or how teens think they want to see themselves) rather than actually going out and talking to a sample few. So what better way to convey what goes on inside the walls of a high school than to literally do just that? French-American filmmaker Frédéric Da’s microbudget mumblecore drama Teenage Emotions takes on that challenge, blurring the lines between reality and fiction to create an unvarnished, intimate portal inside the complex network of a modern-day high school. The result is a competent and welcome relief from the oppressive self-seriousness and empty spectacle dictating the current slate of coming-of-age stories, even if the effect of its naturalism ultimately feels slight.
Acting as a hybrid of Eighth Grade’s neorealist cringe and Frederick Wiseman’s minimalistic, fly-on-the-wall style, Teenage Emotions benefits from employing an inventive, stripped-down iPhone aesthetic to record its pimple-faced, nonprofessional subjects. Unlike Sean Baker’s scrappy breakthrough Tangerine, which famously used an iPhone to shoot footage, Da resists adding flash or saturation to his images, instead documenting everything in extreme close-ups with an unsettlingly raw, video-diary-like quality. That technique mostly works in the film’s favor, as we get to witness a cesspool of L.A. high school kids in all of their flaws, eccentricities, and acne scars. There’s Jaya (Jaya Harper, daughter of Laura Dern), who asks her popular friend Clementine (Clementine Warner) for advice on how to attract boys; Jayden (Jayden Capers), who gets shit from his squad of misogynistic friends for refusing to partake in lambasting the girls at his school; and Silas (Silas Mitchell), a freshman who becomes green with jealousy when he learns that his longtime crush is dating a senior.
The conversations that surface from these encounters don’t really engender any major or profound epiphanies as to why Gen-Z acts the way they do, but Da’s casual, nonjudgmental portrayal of their interactions are still fascinating and immersive. Just seeing how these kids communicate and exploit each other, all while quietly dealing with their own insecurities, is enough to gain a compassionate understanding of the small everyday predicaments they face, conflicts that may seem minor and irrelevant in retrospect but feel massive and soul-crushing in the moment. Da’s real-life role as a teacher to these students also imbues some depth to these exchanges; there’s a palpably comfortable improvisational energy in their performances that were likely brought out by Da’s trust and guidance in them. Without probing his pupils, Da refrains from coloring his observations with his own point of view, a method that has both its pros and cons.
For the most part, the loose, disconnected thread of subplots offers a holistic sense of how teens operate within their respective social spheres. We see all kinds of unique little details that define the high school experience: the loneliness of the friend-zone, the pressures to socialize as an introvert in an extroverted setting, the exasperation of studying biology terms whose definitions are as impossible to remember as they are extraneous to our own emotional development.
At the same time, the lack of a cohesive narrative structure leaves a lot of these threads and arcs without a proper resolution. It’s likely the pandemic played a part in this, as Teenage Emotions was ostensibly filmed in January 2020, just two months before schools closed. Regardless of COVID’s disruption to the filmmaking process, some scenes play out much more contrived than others. One prime example is the young girl who adorns the film’s poster. Da follows her briefly, recording her wallowing in despair over her boyfriend’s infidelity and at one point, capturing her mascara-stained reaction at an almost intrusively close angle. The staginess of this moment comes off more as a clumsy distraction than an inspired creative choice, although the illuminating conversation that follows between the girl and her best friend reorients us back to the film’s engrossing naturalism.
Even when it strains to connect, Teenage Emotions remains a worthwhile cinematic experiment. For every forced moment of drama, there are several more enlightening snapshots chronicling the mundane dynamics of adolescence, including not one, not two, but three different instances where students share gleefully profane raps to impress their classmates. Rather than hit the audience over the head with moralistic messaging or holding the audience’s hand with schematic storytelling, Teenage Emotions lets the kids speak for themselves.
