13 and never been kissed

Hey look, it’s Jessica and me when we were teenagers! Ha ha only joking this of course is Thirteen, a film by Catherine Hardwicke. In it a 13 yr-old girl makes friends with the cool girl in school and suddenly finds herself stealing, getting piercings, skipping school, giving blow jobs to boys and taking a lot of drugs... And her family is falling apart.

I have to try to recapture my feelings about the film, since I wrote quite a detailed post about it yesterday which disappeared in a weird internet blip...

So, anyway, what I liked about the film was the way it caught that teenage feeling where everything is intense yet fleeting, where suddenly whole new worlds of experience, pleasure and pain are opening up and it's all very exciting and frightening and new. Hardwicke uses tried and tested but effective techniques to render this - hand held cameras, lots of disjointed close-up images, saturated colours (hyper-yellow in a tripped-out candy store, cold blue when her Mum is crying and trying to hug her so much they end up on the kitchen floor) and very high or low angle shots giving a feeling of intensified or exaggerated perspective.

What I didn't like so much was the way the whole thing was tied-in very much with Tracy's family situation, as though only kids from a 'broken homes' or whatever would go off the rails... It ends up being a lot less shocking than it sets out to be, and actually quite conservative, I think. Personally I'm more interested in how adolescence (whether in an extreme way like this or on a much subtler level) is more generally a period of something like experimental madness - a time when things can potentially go very wrong for pretty much any kid. I think Larry Clark's films capture this really well (Kids, Bully). He forgets about blaming the parents and just goes right into the kids' worlds - yes it's the terrible, nightmare extreme of adolescence but I still think it gets something more universal about that moment. So Hardwicke may think she's found the new Chlöe Sevigny (Evan Rachel Wood's resemblance is striking!) but I don't think 13 makes such a big mark as Kids nearly 10 yrs earlier, or the 1981 German film Christiane F about a 14 yr-old who gets drawn into the drug scene in Berlin.

What do you reckon?