Many thanks to film reviewer, essayist, and editor Lisa Ann Cockrel for offering this review of Towelhead. She describes it as “a gripping and provocative tale of a 13-year-old girl waking up to her own sexuality in a social vacuum that leaves her vulnerable to abuse.”
CAUTION: Lisa writes:
As Towelhead is a powerful cautionary tale about the affects of our hypersexualized culture and the importance of caring adults in the lives of children, I wish everyone could see it. But given that this movie contains explicit sexual content that involves a 13-year-old girl, even adults should approach with caution. Towelhead is rated R for strong disturbing sexual content and abuse involving a young teen, and for language.
So, you know… lots of fun for the whole family.
Here’s Lisa’s review:
Towelhead is an unflinching, darkly humorous drama about a 13-year-old girl waking up to her own sexuality in a social and moral vacuum. Surrounded by narcissistic parents who are at turns threatened and dismissive of Jasira’s budding beauty, she is left vulnerable to neighbors, peers, and media moguls who all have their own agenda for their attentions to the young girl. The tagline for the movie is “How can you find yourself if no one can see you?” And indeed, no one is looking at (or out for) Jasira. Rather her body is a kind of Rorschach test that reveals the insecurity, prejudice, regret, and lust in those around her.
We meet Jasira (a stunning debut performance by Summer Bishil) in a bathroom, the camera tight on her eyes, looking anxious and bored at the same time in that way that teens master early. Off camera a man’s voice attempts to assure Jasira that the girls at the pool tease her by calling her Chewbacca because they’re jealous of her womanly features. But he’s going to help, though, “you probably shouldn’t tell your mother.” The camera pans out and we see Jasira in her bathing suit, shaving cream fringing her crotch. Her mother’s boyfriend is going to shave her public hair.
At that moment, all the oxygen seems to leave the theater. Make no mistake about it— Towelhead pulls no punches in its depiction of teenage sexuality and both sexual and emotional abuse. (I was relieved to learn that the actress who plays Jasira was in fact 18 during the filming of the movie.) The audience is often pushed from deep disgust to laughter and back while watching this brave-yet-poorly equipped girl try to navigate the conflicting messages she’s getting about her body and sex and her own desires.
In the wake of the incident with her boyfriend, Jasira’s mom (Maria Bello as Gail) ships Jasira off to Texas to live with her Lebanese father (Peter Macdissi as Rifat). “This is all your fault,” Gail tells the sobbing Jasira as they wait in the boarding area at the airport. And the next morning Jasira gets a slap across the face for appearing at the breakfast table in sleeping shorts and a t-shirt her father finds too revealing. He is strict, yes. But complicated also. A Catholic (we learn in passing references), he won’t allow Jasira to use tampons when her period starts, as though they suggest some moral compromise. And yet, he has no qualms about having loud sex with his new girlfriend while Jasira is in the house, or making out with the girlfriend in front of Jasira in the kitchen for that matter. Rifat also frequently leave Jasira alone in their suburban house when he spends the night at his girlfriend’s place, leaving her even more open to the advances of Mr. Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart), a neighbor for whom she babysits.
It’s in the Vuoso household that Jasira discovers pornography and is aroused, leading her into a habit of masturbation. When Mr. Vuoso discovers her secret, he uses it as leverage to create an intimacy with Jasira that leads to some of the most uncomfortable scenes I have seen on the big screen ever. A pregnant neighbor (Toni Collete as Melina) suspects something is wrong in the relationship between Mr. Vuoso and Jasira and provides seemingly the only sane adult presence in Jasira’s life. But her support and advice don’t avoid calamity.
One of the most unsettling aspects of this movie is the way the story refuses to judge what’s going on. The characters are complex and never dismissible. The would-be villain is also the one who can tell Jasira what her mom failed to say, “This isn’t your fault.” And Jasira is never simply a victim. She is a girl on the cusp of womanhood and sexual maturity trying to figure out what sex is all about without the benefit of caring adults to provide her with a viable framework for thinking about sex. She gets a boyfriend and is assertive about what she likes. And she likes orgasms. That fact alone will be hard for many moviegoers. But it’s a reminder that despite modern social structures that have people waiting longer and longer to marry and procreate, our bodies are capable of this work at a much younger age—sometimes as early as 13.
In an interview after the Chicago screening of Towelhead I attended, writer and director Alan Ball said “I think it’s very clear that what goes on in the movie is wrong. And as a director I didn’t need to say, ‘oh boy, this is wrong.’ But I also realize that this movie hits a lot of emotional buttons and some people won’t be able to see past their own emotional reaction.” It’s both the brilliance of the movie and a central caution for those considering seeing it that Towelhead hits a lot of emotional buttons.
This is no removed documentary on the horrors of sexual abuse. Jasira is beautiful and desirable. The sex scenes are titillating. The absurdity of the behavior of the adults in her life and Jasira’s experiences often have the audience laughing at things that are anything but funny. And in all of this there is no narrator pronouncing judgment. No guide telling you what is and is not wrong. No guide telling you that everything will be okay. And in this sense, this comic-book like narrative feels very much true to life. And sadly, in a world where one in three girls (and one in six boys) experiences inappropriate sexual contact with an adult, Towelhead is too true to life.
Directed by: Alan Ball
Runtime: 124 minutes
Cast: Summer Bishil (Jasira), Maria Bello (Gail), Peter Macdissi (Rifat), Aaron Eckhart (Travis Vuoso), Toni Collette (Melina), Eugene Jones (Thomas)
Want a second opinion?
Try Sean Axmaker of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Ball’s compassion for Jasira is unqualified and her performance is affecting, especially when she slips into a high, shy, tentative little girl voice in the presence of domineering adults. But, as in his script for “American Beauty,” he puts the screws to the rest of the characters with a glib comic flip, and his direction only compounds the cartoonish characterizations.
For all the provocative observations about the sexualizing of girls developing at ever younger ages, confronted with sexual imagery and social double standards before they are emotionally prepared to sort through them, Ball’s snide humor and cynical arrogance undercut his message at every turn. It gives his satirical portrait of American suburban life and adult hypocrisy a self-satisfied, sanctimonious superficiality.
Then there’s¬†Dirty Harry:
All of this adds up to what was the ugliest film experience of my life. Everyone around me enjoyed themselves enormously (grotesquely, much of the film is presented as a comedy) as I sat there shell shocked that a director would shoot, not from a predatory character’s point of view, but his own point of view, a thirteen year old character as though she were a centerfold model. Whatever issues Mr. Ball’s hoping to work out here, the end result is an artistically bankrupt, morally indefensible, piece of exploitation that should attract every raincoat-wearing deviant into theatres when Warner Independent releases it September 20th.
And now, Peter Suderman at Culture11 tears it to pieces:
Ball’s no lame Hollywood hack; he’s a master manipulator ‚Äî there‚Äôs no question he‚Äôs made a jarring movie. Towelhead lacks American Beauty‘s glossy fantasy sequences or overt symbolism, but its muted stylishness is undeniably effective. That‚Äôs part of what makes its infantile sexual nihilism so infuriating.
In keeping with the outlook that dominated Beauty, Ball seems to view ignorance, bigotry, and sexual repression as the cornerstones of suburban America. In 1986, David Lynch trod the same territory far more effectively in Blue Velvet; but Lynch’s freaky-deaky sensibility put the film into the realm of horror-show fantasy. Velvet was a safari into the wilds of American weirdness; Towelhead never gets beyond the blinders of its own snide superiority.
It’s almost difficult to imagine a movie more condescending. Aside from Jasira, the only sympathetic characters are a young couple on the cul de sac who shield Jasira from her father and buy her a book on sexual development. By the end, the film effectively suggests that what the suburbs really need is to simply respect and celebrate the decision of young teenagers to have sex, just as long as it’s with each other. What can Ball possibly imagine will come of this? It’s as if he decided to strap himself with culture-war dynamite and make a visit to every multiplex in the country.
What he ended up with, though, was a total misfire — embarrassing, ineffective, and smarmy. If anything, Ball’s accomplished the opposite of what he’s set out to do: He fails in his effort to portray the suburbs as petty, parochial, and partisan, but he makes a rather convincing case for himself.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Much of Ball’s work has a disturbing streak of misogyny and what I’d call an unhealthy focus on the sexual aspects of teenage girls that stems directly from their youth. In his first play, “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress,” the strongest and most assertive woman in the group winds up falling for what might very well be a slick talker with a harmful agenda, and the character who’s identified as the youngest in the group has a scene in which she flashes a crowd. In “American Beauty,” we’ve got Annette Bening’s harridan, Thora Birch “discovering love” as the IMDB blurb puts it and Mena Suvari playing a teenage girl it’s somehow OK to make the object of a grown man’s sexual fantasies because she talks about sleeping around. And now this.
It’s not in *all* his stuff, and I guess he’s nowhere near as creepy as Larry Clark or the Woody Allen of the last 10 years, but there’s enough there that I’m as eager to see this movie as I am to see “Hounddog” or to have an anesthesia-free appendectomy.