Trying to write about girlhood is hard because you find yourself using words like, “gauzy”, “liminal”, “delicate”, “fleeting”. These cheesy things we say about growing up are true after all, but figuring out how to say it again convincingly is the challenge. So major dues must be paid to Jenny Gage, a photographer-cum-director, for her first feature, All This Panic. In a cinema verité-style documentary, she traces a group of teenaged girls. With a delicate directorial presence, she captures those fleeting moments in the gauzy days of late girlhood — the liminal space of halting, uncertain growth. See? Awful.
Jokes aside, there are a couple striking qualities to this piece of work. First, there is the disconcerting feeling of hearing fully formed, finely articulated voices coming out of these girls’ mouths. Sage, headed to a scholarship at Howard University, lays out the social straitjacket of girlhood with un-precious simplicity, “the teenage body is so oversexualized, the teenage female body especially. People want to see you, but they don’t want to hear what you have to say.” But then there is Ginger, a prickly, insecure aspiring actress. Early on, she delivers a speech with practiced flourishes in pitch, “I’m petrified of getting old. I can’t stand the idea that one day someone will tell me, ‘You look a bit old for that outfit.’”
This suggests one of the major difficulties of this age — not being able to tell the difference from when you’ve hit on something, and when you’re imitating the way it sounds to be profound. A lot of both come out of their, and all of our, mouths when we’re young. Only a loose portrait like this one captures all the frailties, absurdities, and totally accurate epiphanies this age occasions.
Another important feature of the movie is that the cast that Gage selected is wide-ranging in their socio-economic position. Lena, a leading cast member, refers to Child Protective Services casually as CPS. Ginger and her sister, Dusty, another cast member, seem to live in downtown Manhattan. Sage lives in comfortably middle-class Brooklyn, but as a scholarship student to a predominantly white private school, her class and color are thrown up in stark relief. These conditions are of course essential to their incumbent adulthood, and yet, even with this wide range of classes, they have more in common with each other than not. Their adolescence is somehow their most salient feature, trumping all other divisions.
I enjoyed most scenes with Dusty and her best friend Delia. They tumble into each other at total ease. They seem to always be in the middle of an endless day together. Watching them, you can’t see how it won’t last forever. You have to reconcile the evident fact that they will someday grow up, live years and years, with that feeling of infinity. That’s where Gage captures the feeling of being a teenaged girl — this tiny detail in a slim, subtle movie. You could miss it and in a moment, it’s gone.
