Movie Review: “First Girl I Loved”
I resisted watching First Girl I Loved for 18 whole days even though I am a gay woman who is very openly starved for female queer stories. Coming of age coming out stories sadly, usually are The Worst, and I didn’t want to risk this one being the same. I am so happy to have seen it.
In short, Kerem Sanga’s First Girl I Loved is a beautiful film; Ricardo Diaz’s cinematography makes it literally so, while Sanga’s writing and direction allow it to be more than just skin-deep. And, despite having two major tropes to avoid — growing up and coming out — First Girl for the most part landed on its (very gay) feet.
The film begins without dialogue, following Anne (Dylan Gelula) as she rides her bike to a softball game to take photos of Sasha Basañez (Brianna Hildebrand), the team’s star player and Anne’s crush, under the guise of a yearbook ad. That then leads to Anne interviewing Sasha, which leads to a courtship, which leads both of them into a relationship and us to the crux of the film. As Anne and Sasha become close, they navigate the uncharted territory that they are simultaneously experiencing — sometimes doing so together, sometimes apart. The film deals with personal identity, relationships, and self-acceptance — all the expected qualities of a Queer High School Movie. However, it does so gently and with an understanding of the filmmaking craft that effectively avoids slushy condescension.
Most of the film takes a cue from its beginning and features very little dialogue at all. Much of the important conversations take place via text with the exchanges displayed on the screen to include the viewer: Anne telling her friend Clifton (Mateo Arias) she has something important to tell him, Sasha flirting with Anne, Anne flirting with Sasha. It is clear that texting is the important method of communication and to this story. Yet despite the reliance on silence, the conversations feel as vibrant as if they were spoken aloud.
One of the reasons First Girl is so successful is because of its ability to avoid falling into clichés. The first way it does this is with these texts. The messages are natural and relatable and not written with condescension. (There are precisely zero painful “LOL”s included in order to make the writer seem in the know.) The film does the modern day courtship justice and recreates it so successfully that is both joyful and painful to watch. Sanga writes his characters’ texts with the care that he writes their dialogue, adding millennial text messaging to the list of authenticities the film boasts. The first exchange Anne and Sasha share is so genuine and feels so much like the first wave of flirtation we have all experienced– they talk about everything and nothing, frantically and all of the time, undoubtedly accruing pages upon pages of back-and-forth. Anyone who has fallen for someone in the age of iMessage will surely relate.
However, one of the trickiest parts of a film that rests its conflict on the relationship of two young gay people is that the conflict can so easily become the existence of the relationship itself. Films that fall into this trap feature a same-sex relationship that is clearly “hard” and “wrong” and met with resistance, and the arc of the film surrounds the efforts to overcome the oppression and consequences of the life made hard by a homosexual existence. First Girl I Loved avoids this by focusing on the emotional and character-based components between the two girls. The issue is not that there is a lesbian relationship. The issue is that Anne is a teenager and is experiencing a sexual awakening. And isn’t that messy.
In fact, the only true time the film leans on the presence of homophobia is in its last minutes. Some may view this as another inevitably sad end to an LGBTQ story, but in fact it is a gift. We get one hour, eleven minutes, and three seconds of a gay girl navigating her world. The harrowing reality of hate and fear doesn’t enter this narrative until its end, and the viewer is able to get lost in the film rather than being smacked in the face with inequality. Those who have seen it may bring up Clifton, Anne’s supposedly best friend, who reacts to her coming out as a personal rejection and proceeds to refer to her as a dyke for the rest of the film. But while this was certainly not pleasant or particularly welcome, it isn’t very featured and didn’t feel rooted in cruelty. The slurs he spat seemed more of a product of his immaturity than of hate, and while that certainly doesn’t make his use of them okay, it did not add the same sour taste to the film that it could have.
What First Girl does well with its authentic portrayals of teenagers and newly identifying lesbians, it also echoes in its technical elements. The height of Anne and Sasha’s love occurs during a sleepover when they sneak out to a bar. They are drinking, being hit on by older men, and the room has a dark seediness. Then, Sasha pulls Anne away and they begin to dance. Timidly at first. The room is still dark. Sasha wraps Anne’s hands around her waist, and suddenly the room becomes gold. Diaz bakes the room in a glittering light, submerging the girls in a lusty summer-like haze that transports them to almost an alternate reality. They become basked in a glow, and as their hands grip tighter and hips move closer, the room becomes just as alight as their bodies and minds.
First Girl I Loved is not a happy love story, but it is a satisfying one. The utter relief to have watched a movie about a lesbian that doesn’t turn out to be unintentionally offensive in its simplicity is monumental. While it would be nice to have many a happy lesbian love story at our fingertips the ladies finding happily ever after, the importance of First Girl I Loved’s existence should not be overlooked merely because the girls don’t end up together.
Anne may not find herself with Sasha, but she does find herself (with a little help from Cameron Esposito). And ultimately, isn’t that what’s most important?
