Dir. David Gordon Green, 2003, US, 108 mins
Cast:
Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Patricia Clarkson, Shea Whigham, Benjamin Mouton
There's a raw quality to All The Real Girls, a kind of hand-held, documentary feel that adds a realism and intimacy big-budget films often miss. It also makes for occasionally awkward viewing - almost voyeuristic - but in a way that reveals, bones and all, the complete mess that 'being in love' can be.
Set in a small mill town in North Carolina, the film evokes the psychological landscape of adolescence, where there's nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nothing happens. 22-year-old Paul (Paul Schneider, George Washington) lives with his mother and works for his uncle, and has no expectations beyond the town.
Paul is unable to connect with life. In a wonderful scene, he and his mother dress up as clowns and dance about a children's ward; though everyone else is absorbed in the music and dancing, Paul's bewildered look directly at camera signifies his own exclusion.
With characteristic lack of feeling, he sleeps with and discards a string of women, until he meets his best friend's sister, Noel, and briefly thinks he has found potential in his existence. Best friend Tip, however, can't accept this burgeoning slice of happiness given Paul's rakish past, and each of them is left with a choice to make about their continuing friendships.
Noel (Zooey Deschanel, The Good Girl) has a maturity that Paul does not, even though she has spent her childhood cosseted in a boarding school. It is through Noel's influence that Paul starts to react to life rather than wearing a mask. She teaches him the feeling of sharing confidences and experiences never told out loud before; Paul's resulting attempt to apologise to one of the many women he has unwittingly hurt is a source of both satisfaction and pathos. In light of this growth Noel's infidelity seems incomprehensible, but it sits neatly with the bewilderment that Green's characters face, all of whom are really children playing at being grown-ups. There's charmingly desperate Bust Ass; 'who would you have sex with more, me or a priest?' is his stock question in life. Tip meanwhile is about to become a father, but confesses to wetting the bed and keeping a ladybird collection. And of course there's Noel and Paul, manoeuvring around the realities of a relationship. Falling in love, observes Noel, is so emotional. 'No one tells you that!' Perversely, it takes an act of betrayal for her to realise her feelings for Paul.
David Gordon Green developed the follow-up to his award-winning debut George Washington with Paul Schneider while they were still in college, when both were dumped by girls they were madly in love with. "We were completely depressed," says Schneider. "Trying to find a way out, we decided to write a love story and we came up with the idea for the script.it's about a guy who idealises a woman and thinks that she can save him from a bad situation. In the end he realises that his life is the bad situation and he's the only one who can do anything about it."
What Green and Schneider have created is a quiet, character-led film about the inconsistency of relationships. If there's detraction, it is in the brevity of some scenes and tableaux - so short and unexplained as almost to be subliminal; added to this is occasionally implausible dialogue. Admittedly, some may find charm in 'I had a dream you grew a garden on a trampoline and I was so happy I invented peanut butter'.
Despite that, this is a film to be immersed in - one that must in some way reflect our common experiences of love, both how we ideally wish it was (as at the start of the film) and how it mostly is, as by the conclusion. An atmospheric score and poetic landscapes contribute to this sensory experience, a fitting sequel to themes begun in George Washington.
Ruth Bushi
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