This short film depicts the delicate, subtle yet complicated and ever-changing relationship among girls at a junior high school. These girls are different in their appearance, personality, upbringing, social class, yet these differences work like a magic potion, to push the story forward and reveal the paths of each character. These girls envy each other, compete with each other, yet they rely on each other to grow and change, and even see the reflection of themselves in each other.
The film starts with the gaze of the ‘weak’ girl in the car and ends with the subject of her gaze, the ‘popular girl’, marching towards the distance; right in between, is the journey of her experience of the adolescent life. It is interesting to see how the camera frames and emphasizes the female ‘traits’ of the ‘popular’ girl at the beginning—her lip, her eyes and her breasts. Surprisingly, this is shot from the POV of the ‘weak’ girl. She accepts and adopts the ‘male gaze’ so naturally that it is not hard for us to imagine how she would frame and imagine herself in the same way. This whole story is about how this ‘gaze’ changes over time — as the ‘popular’ girl becomes unpopular, she discovers the other side of this ‘uniformed’ gaze, and starts to pick up the details that she has not noticed before. In the end, as the silhouette of the ‘popular’ girl becomes smaller and smaller, we would be curious how the ‘weak’ girl thinks of her. However, what do know is that she has developed her own ways of seeing and understanding the world and herself.
What is extraordinary about this film is that Sophia Coppola succeeds in portraying the change and growth of the girl with almost purely visual language. We can feel her, think with her and breathe with her in every frame.
