First Girl I Loved (2016)

There’s a direct correlation in First Girl I Loved between how serious the movie gets and how good it is. While the movie starts out fairly lighthearted, it gets darker as the movie goes on. And as it gets darker, it gets worse. First Girl I Loved wasn’t fully prepared to deal with some of the heavy topics they brought up. So why did they put them in at all?

The main character in First Girl I Loved is Anne, a high school senior who works for the yearbook. Anne’s best friend is a boy named Cliff who has a crush on her. However, Anne is oblivious to this. Anne’s own affections lie with a softball player named Sasha. When Anne tells Cliff about her crush, he reacts poorly and the two go from being friends to enemies. Meanwhile, Anne’s relationship with Sasha is difficult as Sasha is still very much not open to the idea that she might like girls.

First Girl I Loved gets weaker as it goes along. This makes it somewhat difficult to review as I liked the first act and hated the third act so it’s more difficult to make absolute statements about the film. This is mostly down to the writing. The directing and acting is more consistent. Specifically, the acting is the best part of this movie. They found three very talented young actors to play the leads and a handful of also talented adult actors to round out the cast. I have no complaints on this score.

But let’s talk about what I do have complaints about, which is the film’s story. As I mentioned, First Girl I Loved gets darker as it goes along. It starts out mostly as a sweet, awkward romance between Anne and Sasha. Then, they just keep throwing conflict and bad events at their main characters. This is most telling in the flashbacks we see throughout the film of the day Anne tells Cliff about her crush. The first time we see part of this scene, they’re friendly and Cliff is maybe ignorant but not mean. But as the movie goes on, these flashbacks get darker and Cliff acts worse and worse. This flashback story ends with a huge emotional blow-up after some ill-advised sexual contact between Cliff and Anne.

First Girl I Loved delves into issues of consent. It should not have. The subplots involving consent, ambiguous consent and lying about consent are too hairy for the movie to effectively deal with. It’s difficult to pick out what the movie did wrong with these subplots because in my opinion, they just shouldn’t have been there at all. Part of the problem is that the movie doesn’t really know what it wants to say about this topic. The movie never outlines what a positive or overtly non-consensual sexual encounter is. Each of the three leads deals with a sexual encounter that could be claimed to be non-consensual and each of the leads’ final position on whether or not this was consensual sex is a big, “I don’t know.” That’s too vague to work.

The other big problem with First Girl I Loved is that all of the characters get shittier over time. Both Anne and Cliff start the movie seeming like decent people who maybe make some bad decisions because they’re teens. But by the end of the film, both of them have done terrible actions beyond what I can allow as just being teen stupidity. Anne purposefully outs Sasha to the school and Cliff just spends the whole movie acting like an absolute dick. The problem is, I think we’re supposed to like these characters. But Anne and Cliff did such bad things that I can’t just wave it off as being teen stupidity. There’s a cruelty to some of their actions which I worry they won’t grow out of. By the end of the movie, I felt like maybe Anne and Cliff are just inherently bad people.

My final issue with this film is how Anne ends the film. She ends up with nothing. Her best friend sucks, she’s not with her love interest because Anne publicly outed her, her bike was stolen and she’s had two not enjoyable sexual encounters. At the end of the film, Anne finally calls herself gay and buys herself a new bike. Is this supposed to be a happy ending? Because to me, it felt like the only way Anne was allowed to come out is by losing everything else. As such, I found this ending depressing. This is not a high school movie I want young queer girls to see. Every scene of the movie is basically about how it’s difficult or impossible to be gay and happy in high school. A heterosexual film wouldn’t have required its lead to have lost so much by the end of the film.

First Girl I Loved is nice to look at and the acting is good. Sadly, the story is a major letdown. Not that every queer movie needs to do this, but I really don’t think this was positive lesbian representation. The story is too dark, the ending too bleak and the characters are too shitty for it to be so. First Girl I Loved was very disappointing because it did start out sweet and enjoyable. However, the filmmakers decided they needed more conflict and angst and ended up with a bunch of dark story elements they weren’t fully prepared to deal with.

Overall rating: 5.4/10

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