It Felt Like Love

“Do you want something from me?”
“What would I want anyways?”

It Felt like Love

82 minutes

Written and Directed by Eliza Hittman 

Starring Gina Piersanti, Giovanna Salimeni

Available on Netflix streaming

There’s something impermanent about Eliza Hittman’s debut feature, something temporary and inherently temporal. It depicts a brief, fleeting moment in the life of one 15-year-old girl named Lila (Gina Piersanti), but that moment is a universal one: the moment of sexual awakening, that strange, often painful berth between blissful innocence and finding one’s self. We first meet Lila as she stares out at the receding waters on a tranquil beach. She turns to face us and we see her face covered by a sunscreen shroud. The pale masque gives her a ghostly visage, the obvious metaphor being it blocks out more than just the sun: she’s young, innocent, a virgin, and the squalor of the real world has yet to permeate her. The film’s not particularly subtle, but neither are hormonal 15-year-olds.

Lila’s best friend is Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni), who’s several months older and thus possesses far more insight into the intricacies and ambiguities of life. She tries to project herself as precocious, an expert in promiscuity; she flaunts her ostensible experience, telling Lila about a boy’s amateur attempts at sex: “I hate when they need practice.” Lila later repeats the line to her younger brother, trying to impress him after she sees him talking to a girl. He’s not impressed.

We watch these kids struggle to navigate the labyrinthine world of love and lust, but they have no teachers, no guides. They learn about love from horny men and porn. We watch Lila watch older boys watch porn, and she doesn't understand why the woman on screen “rubs herself like that.” Neither do the boys, of course, but they fake it anyway: “To get off!” Piersanti does an admirable job of emoting with so few words. She keeps a look of pain and fear on her face for virtually the entire movie. Too bad she’s never given the chance to express any other kinds of emotions.

Hittman directs with a naturalist approach, eschewing a musical score and flashy camerawork, but she sustains the same sad fleeting moment for the entire duration of the film. When we meet Lila her life sucks; when we leave her, her life sucks even more. Harttman doesn't really capture the emotional turmoil of her young subjects—no one can really capture it; it’s too wild, too ethereal—as much as she casts her gaze at these children and watches them without intrusion. She keeps us distant from the inner workings of Lila’s head, but she has such a soft touch the film is still brazenly intimate. It’s a kind of foil to Abdellatif Kechiche’s beautiful, Palme d’Or-winning Blue is the Warmest Color, a sprawling, 3-hour non-tragedy of self-realization through sexual experimentation; It Felt Like Love is far less romantic, and far less grand in scope. It offers no respite or hope, and our characters don't grow as much as they're cut down, emotionally. Its subjects are children, and it subjects those children to constant anxiety. 

Everyone knows that children are the cruelest creatures. But the film doesn't really go anywhere. Its children are left as confused at the end as they are in the beginning. It gets monotonous, both aesthetically and tonally: Hittman and cinematographer Sean Porter favor visual shallowness, which works in certain scenes, obscuring Lila’s view of the world. The camerawork is articulate and clean, but Hittman and Porter overuse the shallow focus effect. The result has the bitter taste of an over-steeped tea bag. And the unpleasantness begins to feel heavy-handed after a while; every boy in the movie looks like a caddish gym-rat, and every sexual encounter is pervaded by an uncomfortable abrasiveness. These are kids who probably think “Blurred Lines” is a romantic love ballad. Yeah, teenagers don’t understand sex (though does anyone, really?), but to depict them all so sexually self-destructive, and to depict their sexual exploits as relentlessly volatile is both untrue and unfair. We see nothing but sorrow in Lila’s life, which renders the emotional payoff redundant and weak. As well-made and well-acted as it is, It Felt Like Love is like most people's first time: short and not quite satisfying. Though I doubt it was Hittman’s intention to shame her characters, that’s sort of what it feels like in the end.

It Felt Like Love gets three-and-a-half emotionally damaged childhoods out of five.