Teenage Cocktail

Teenage Cocktail had so little insight into teenage girls I started to doubt whether they existed at all. But wait! Over 50% of my classmates were teenage girls. In fact, some of my best friends were teenage girls. And, to get a little personal with you guys, I too was once a teenage girl. And if I know one thing about teenage girls it’s that lots of them love to share their experiences and talk about their feelings. Especially if they think it might get them some sort of recognition. With all of this in mind, I just don’t understand why this movie about teenage girls lacked so much insight into their subject matter and didn’t seem to do anything to solve it such as talking to real life teenage girls.

Here’s the act breakdown of Teenage Cocktail. Act 1: rushed and cliche. We are introduced to our lead character, Annie. She is, of course, the new girl at school. Annie makes friends with Jules, who has ambitions of being a dancer. The girls grow closer. While Jules does have a boyfriend, she is clearly closer to Annie who at this point has an obvious crush on her.

Act II: exploitative. Annie and Jules have shared a kiss at this point but their relationship is still ambiguous. They also go to a party and seem to engage in some sort of neon, teen orgy at one point. The main plot point here is that Jules reveals to Annie that she works as a cam girl for money. She wears a mask to protect her anonymity and the fact that she’s underage. To make more money, Jules recruits Annie to do lesbian stuff with her on the cam website. The girls revel in their easy money.

Act III: an unearned dive into the thriller genre. Annie and Jules’ camming gets discovered and they face a great deal of trouble. As such, they decide to run away to New York where they’re free from adult authority figures. To raise money, they engage in prostitution with a married man named Frank. They then blackmail him. Frank retaliates by coming after the girls. In the last fifteen minutes of the film, violence ensues.

My problems with the first two acts are pretty consistent. It’s a movie about teenager girls written and directed by someone who doesn’t have enough empathy for that subject. Writer/director John Carchietta is in his 40’s and unfortunately, you can tell. The characters don’t sound like teenagers. They sound like what out of touch adults think teenagers sound like. This goes double for teenage girls.

I have a new set of problems with the third act. The sudden descent into Annie and Jules facing violent consequences comes out of nowhere. Frank, the man who they blackmail turns to violence in a way that seems rushed and out of character. While Frank is not a particularly well established character, this did seem at odds with what we had been shown of him. He mostly just seemed like a loser. That he turns to such desperate violence seemed out of place. But hey, we had to punish these teenage girls for daring to profit off the fact that they’re hot teenage girls somehow right?

This is just such a male gaze-y movie. Even in universe, that’s true. Almost all of Annie and Jules’ physical scenes are while they’re camming. So basically, their entire physical relationship is subject to the male gaze. The movie doesn’t try and say anything about this though. It just says hey! Aren’t these underage girls hot? Please enjoy looking at them! The camera lingers over their underage characters in states of half dress and really revels in the idea of these two pretty but teenage girls doing cam work. It’s shot incredibly provocatively. Sure, the actresses are in their mid-20’s but the characters are underage so that’s not exactly ideal.

But as much as the movie loves looking at these girls being sexy, it also punishes and shames them for it. I’m not saying Annie and Jules were right to blackmail Frank or technically engage in child pornography but the third act is so much about cutting these girls down to size and I don’t think it was deserved. Teenage Cocktail enjoys the idea of teen sexuality and will exploit that subject matter but punishes those who engage in it. I’m just not on board with a movie that spends more time shaming teenagers who engage in sex work than the clients who employ their services.

There are two things I like about Teenage Cocktail. The first is the montages. These scenes are well-shot, well-lit and have a mood. They also do advance the plot and are effective at essentially summarizing a passage of time into a brief scene. The second is that Annie and Jules do have chemistry. Their dialogue is pretty poor but the performances from Nichole Bloom and Fabianne Therese help sell it. There’s a casual physical intimacy between the two and they do just seem happy to be in each other’s presence. I do also like the way they took an intimate teenage friendship and took it to a queer place. The idea was good and the acting of it well-executed. The dialogue brought it down but hey, this is not the worst relationship between two teen girls I’ve seen.

Unfortunately, those positives are not enough save Teenage Cocktail from being bad. Looking at the credits, the director; writers and producers are primarily men. That shows. I’m tired of movies about teenage girls where without even looking it up, I can tell that their lines were written by middle-aged men. There’s no understanding of Annie and Jules and little sympathy either. Given that those are the protagonists of the piece, that’s a huge problem.

Overall rating: 3.9/10

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