The new movie Girls Like Girls, which is widely recommended, seems as confused as its characters are supposed to be.
Teenage Coley (Maya da Costa), who has relocated from San Diego after her mother’s death to her estranged father’s rural Oregon home, is befriended by Sonya (Myra Molloy). Their friendship soon becomes romantic and then is abruptly ended when Sonya leaves for summer dance camp, and both confront their feelings and fears, and renew their relationship, after Sonya returns.
Director Haley Kiyoko, who co-authored the screenplay with Stefanie Scott and Chloe Okuno, explains in introductory remarks that this movie originated as a song (2015) and later became a novel (2023). She also adds for those who are unfamiliar with these previous versions that it’s an account of being seen, and addresses the need for more queer stories.
GIRLS as a movie is successful enough. The cinematography is evocatively languid, and elicits high school summer experience. Also, Da Costa is credible even as she stops short of exploring some emotions, which seems as much a directing and writing problem.
One problem however is its relevance. Lesbian love has a long history at least in the West (e.g., Sappho’s 630-570 BCE love poems). Moreover, more than 6 in 10 Americans today still believe that gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable, and most LGBTQ Americans today report feeling socially supported.
A bigger problem is that the story seems as confused as some of its characters. The movie is considered a romantic coming-of-age story, but its plot suggests something more complicated that to its detriment is never examined.
One obvious possibility is the challenge Coley’s and Sonya’s relationship to heterosexual expectations as expressed by Sonya’s sometime boyfriend Trenton (Levon Hawke). Another perhaps less so arises in the awkward exchanges between Coley and her estranged father Curtis (Zach Braff), which seem less about Coley’s sexual identity than their family history, and which reappear in the mostly off-camera interactions between Sonya and her mother and sister.
These and other possibilities offer opportunities to offer something more than saccharinely superficial sentiments about lesbian love, and explain why this story from someone whose fans consider “lesbian Jesus” seems more like an after-school special. This condition seems confirmed by my discovery after the move that the adapted song was offered as a YA novel.
This movie also struggles with what I consider the icult of the individual, but that is part of a larger cultural immediacy complaint, and not specific to this movie, which still seems more suitable for smaller screens, such as a music video, and not a big one as a feature film.
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