- It Felt Like Love
Returning to the subject of worthwhile art movies with unpromising titles, tomorrow Facets begins a weeklong run of a new American indie called It Felt Like Love. With regards to the title, I suspect this one was meant to evoke junior high poetry—the main character, after all, is a 14-year-old girl beginning to experience feelings of lust and romantic longing. Writer-director Eliza Hittman makes it clear that the heroine doesn’t experience these feelings naturally, but rather is forced into them. Everywhere she goes, it seems, Lila finds incitements to sexual activity. Her neighbor, a boy of about her age, boasts of his sexual experiences (probably imaginary, but detailed all the same). Her 16-year-old best friend has become sexually active and talks about this nonstop. And the older boys she and her friend start hanging around expose them to hard-core pornography, mostly of young women being debased. The summary recalls Larry Clark’s exposés of teen sexuality, but Hittman’s perspective is more sorrowful than Clark’s, if also less empathetic.
