"It Felt Like Love"

Due in no small part to the understandable fascination male writers and artists have with the mysteries of female sexuality, the sexual awakening of teenage girls and young adult women is ground for storytelling that has been so cultivated over the centuries as to be almost depleted. But as fairly uncommon as it is to see such a story be told by an actual woman, it is even rarer to see the discovery of the full urgency of one’s sexual desire be connected to the concurrent need for societal and personal validation as an adult – particularly as a woman – with such a remarkable combination of lucidity and sensuality as in Eliza Hittman’s feature-length debut It Felt Like Love.

Taking evident narrative cues from Catherine Breillat’s 2001 masterpiece Fat Girl, Hittman centers her story around her female protagonist’s perception of her slightly older best friend’s nascent sexual activity and its effects on her own expectations and desires. But whereas Breillat analyzed a complicated sisterly relationship with a characteristically distanced and clinical eye, Hittman dives deeply into 14 year-old Lila’s feelings and sensations with long focals and close-ups that gently caress her body and its surroundings without ever objectifying or sensationalizing them.

Constantly subjected (or rather subjecting herself) to her best friend Chiara’s escapades with her carefree boyfriend Patrick, Lila is surrounded by expressions of sexual desire and pleasure that she sees quite plainly yet never truly grasps. Her attempted mimicry of their behaviour and unconvincing pretense to a sex life she doesn’t have – typical adolescent posing I remember all too painfully well – doesn’t just signify an incomplete idea of what it means to be a woman, born from a need to conform to artificial social norms; it’s also a misdirected externalization of poorly understood impulses both sexual and emotional.

Her encounter with college-aged hunk Sammy – first glimpsed, in a subtle but amusing visual metaphor, as a blurry upside-down reflection on the wet shore that gets washed away the moment he walks on it – provides her with an opportunity to channel these impulses towards someone who is in a position to satisfy them, and in doing so fill a void her friends and her disinterested widowed father cannot satisfy. The funny thing about the viewer’s relationship to the male objects of the girls’ desire is that each of their introduction informs the viewer, through either visualized events (Patrick pocketing a ring in the house he later gives to Chiara as a “promise ring”) or dialogue (Chiara telling Patrick that Sammy is a “douche” who’ll “fuck anything” while the picture shows Lila looking in his direction) that they are no good, and yet we still catch ourselves feeling some degree of suspense towards how their relationships, if any, will turn out. Like teenagers, we act and feel against our better knowledge.

As Lila is present in all scenes¹, much of what the viewer sees is directly subordinate to or heavily influenced by her own gaze, through subjective shots or close-ups attributed to it. Stomachs, backs, thighs, pectorals and clothed buttocks populate her world in shots whose angles, frequently and ever-so-slightly skewed, and blurry backgrounds create a sense of genuinely felt arousal and frustrated yearning. In some cases, such as a particularly striking scene in which Lila attends a Sweet Sixteen party while seated in front of a wall padded with mirror panels, the background itself becomes another extension of Lila’s confusion and sensory overload – not as overwrought symbols but rather as stimulators of the same disorientation she feels.

Sammy himself is properly introduced in a series of loosely-connected close-ups and pans of his erogenous body parts (his back, his pectorals, the side of his face, his stomach…) interspersed with a couple of countershots of Chiara’s face as she talks to him. One thinks of Eric Rohmer’s similarly-fragmented introduction of Haydée in La Collectionneuse – and upon remembering the latter’s thoughtful observations on what strange, maddening enigmas women can appear to men (a recurring theme in the French New Wave), particularly men as shallow as Patrick and Sammy, It Felt Like Love starts to almost look like a millennial feminine counterpart to Rohmer’s 1967 milestone; a film in which the opposite sex and the feelings they inspire in heterosexuals incite as much fascination as they do fear, and in which social (and in this case psychological) role-play is the default coping mechanism for the ensuing inner chaos. An inner chaos that Hittman brings out through a delicate attention to the way her actors’ bodies move and appear in relation to each other, as well as a sound mix that at times slightly accentuates surrounding noise over dialogue.

Her close shots put special emphasis on physical contact between characters, whether it’s Chiara and Patrick or Chiara and Lila, blurring personal boundaries (though the nature of the two girls’ friendship is never ambiguous) and building an atmosphere of primal sensuality. When Lila gently nudges her younger friend Nate’s legs with her foot and later lies on her back (close-up on her thighs) after trying to get her dog to join her on the bed, the conveyed sensations are not the same as when Patrick rubs suntan lotion in the shape of a heart on Chiara’s back in the very next shot, but the placement of these close shots and of the body parts they represent (feet, thighs, back, fingers, torsos) link them all as part of the same motion for companionship, whether it is on the part of the toucher or the touched.

As the scenes between each couple progress, the disparity amongst those motions becomes more pronounced by both the scenes’ content and Hittman’s visual and sound treatment of them. In the scene that borrows most obviously from Fat Girl even as it ingeniously reverses the gender positions and fluctuates the power dynamics between them, Lila is forced to lie and listen as Chiara masturbates Patrick and discusses the “seriousness” of their relationship while all three share the same bed. The shots do not linger that much on Lila’s discomfort, but rather on the contradictory impulses and desires expressed by the couple’s gestures and dialogue: Emotional connection versus sexual satisfaction, openness versus closure.

In the first of three painful scenes during which Lila psychologically degrades herself by attempting to act as she supposes the older boys expect her to, Eliza Hittman films a series of faces and body gestures that seem to take place in their own sadistic realm as she allows herself to be spanked and rubbed with a ping-pong bat by one of Sammy’s stoned friends in front of a barely visible porn video which she had previously expressed disgust at, only to feign sexual promiscuity after assessing the boys’ enjoyment of it. In a single scene, Hittman manages to express more insightful commentary on the effects of pornography on male and female sexuality than Joseph Gordon-Levitt did in an entire film.

It should not, however, be inferred from this that It Felt Like Love is an entirely painful, downbeat, pessimistic or moralizing film². However fleeting it may be, there is subtle pleasure and joy to be found in Lila’s excursions with her entourage, when the games they are playing with each other and themselves are subdued in favour of instinctive enjoyment of the given moment. Far from pitying, condemning or pandering to adolescent impulsiveness and egocentrism, Eliza Hittman displays empathy and understanding that makes you grateful that you too, at one point in your life, were one of those kids.

¹With the exception of one narratively crucial scene between Patrick and Chiara.

²Though the aforementioned scene’s inclusion of a shot of Lila’s disapproving-looking dog during her disputably consensual encounter does harm its impact somewhat.