Delayed Reaction: First Girl I Loved

The Pitch: Apply the high school, first love melodrama to a lesbian relationship.

The nerdy high school yearbook editor and a star of the softball team fall for each other, despite external complications.

Where I run into problems sometimes with stories about gay characters is that they often get bogged down in the negatives of it. I understand that hatefulness and intolerance can make being gay scary and dangerous for a person. It's important to make people aware of this.  I do only have so much tolerance for stories about the downsides though. There's a reason why in the time that I've seen The Act of Killing once, I've seen About Time maybe a dozen times. Or, more fitting to this topic, it's the reason why I've seen Love, Simon multiple times and own it but am in no hurry for a Boy Erased rewatch. Sorry, I gravitate toward happier stories, or at least ones that prefer to look at the good as much as the bad (or more).

First Girl I Loved strikes an interesting balance. Yeah, there's some darker stuff. Dylan Gelula's Anne loses her best friend over coming out and makes some questionable decisions in her confusion. Brianna Hilderbrand's Sasha definitely lets her fear of what other people would think control her. There's some heavy stuff in this movie. The story with Anne's one-time best friend Clifton has many turns in it, some darker than the movie really knows how to deal with.

Where the movie really shines though is when it's about the awkward courtship between Anne and Sasha. I love their nervous energy as they try to feel each other out early. They both like each other but they aren't sure how the other person feels. It's cute and relatable and real. There's the added tension of course that if one of them isn't interested, the response could be a lot worse than in the "socially acceptable" boy/girl situation, but that's secondary. When you have a crush, the first concern is only "I hope he/she likes me back". This movie captures that well. Gelula and Hilderbrand have great chemistry, even just reacting to each other's texts.

This is the most nuanced work I've seen from either of the stars. Gelula I mainly know from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which is a lot broader than this. Hilderbrand I know from Deadpool, where her performance is 90% eye rolls. They both get a lot of chance to shine here. I'd love if they became Sundance festival staples. As Anne's mom, Pamela Adlon is great in a fairly small role. It's more or less the role she already plays on her show Better Things, so it's no surprise how easy she makes it look.

The movie does get a little messy in the end. That's for better and for worse. The central dilemma isn't one to be "fixed". It's a lot of very high school drama but from a lesser-scene angle. I really don't know what to do with the Clifton character. He's much more complex by the end than I assumed. There's a dangling question about consent hanging over the movie. It's all left intentionally incomplete.

I really liked it though. Strong performances. It tells a lesser told story of high school romance in a balanced way, giving time to both the highs and the lows. The level of melodrama feels appropriate for the character ages. It premiered at Sundance in the NEXT competition, which sounds about right. That's kind of like the super-indie portion of the Sundance film festival, which is already a festival that I describe as having movies that play like incomplete thoughts. 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend