"It Felt Like Love" is first-time writer-director Eliza Hittman's coming-of-age meditation on a Brooklyn teenager's burgeoning sexuality. The teenager in question is Lila who lives with her permissive, aging hippie of a father and occasionally brags about imaginary sexual exploits to Nate, a boy who lives in the neighborhood. The mother is not a factor, having died of cancer some years before.
Lila spends most of her time with her good friend Chiara and her boyfriend, Patrick. While with them at the beach, she makes the acquaintance of Sammy, an older college student who she ends up pursuing. When Sammy gets drunk and passes out, Lila crawls into bed with him. The next morning Sammy can't remember anything and Lila implies that maybe they had sex together.
Mike D'Angelo, writing in "Dissolve," bemoans the generic nature of the world Lila inhabits: "Lila exists in an art-movie void, with no friends or interests that don't directly reflect her predicament; the film is set in the present (characters text each other, etc.), but so strenuously avoids any sort of cultural specificity that just a few revisions could shift it to 1987 That sort of sparseness can be deliberate—a means of conveying timelessness—but here it just seems like a failure of imagination, turning Lila into an emblem rather than a girl."
Eventually Lila finds herself over her head when she finds herself alone with the older guys. Matt Seitz of "RogerEbert.com" describes the encounter but remains dissatisfied: "Several scenes in which Lila hangs out with Sammy and his buddies in a man-cave are mortifying. She is clearly an interloper, and they treat her like one, and somehow their snickering indifference and dimwit innuendo are part of the male-female dance in this world. Lila's closed-off expressions suggest that she if not welcomes, at least expects to be treated with contempt. These rec room scenes rank with the most pessimistic depictions of teen sexuality in recent cinema. Yet however heartfelt and keenly observed this pessimism is, it becomes monotonous.
A.A. Dowd of the "A.V. Club" gets to the essence of "It Felt Like Love's" limitations: "Lila, for all the authentic awkwardness Piersanti breathes into her, is defined so entirely by her mission—embarked upon with an equal measure of anxiety and anticipation—that she never quite comes alive as a character."
"It Felt Like Love" has some impressive cinematography but Ms. Hittman's one-note portrait of teenage obsession, prevents us from believing that these are real people. Nonetheless, I see good things for this director in the future, as this film still shows potential.
Lila spends most of her time with her good friend Chiara and her boyfriend, Patrick. While with them at the beach, she makes the acquaintance of Sammy, an older college student who she ends up pursuing. When Sammy gets drunk and passes out, Lila crawls into bed with him. The next morning Sammy can't remember anything and Lila implies that maybe they had sex together.
Mike D'Angelo, writing in "Dissolve," bemoans the generic nature of the world Lila inhabits: "Lila exists in an art-movie void, with no friends or interests that don't directly reflect her predicament; the film is set in the present (characters text each other, etc.), but so strenuously avoids any sort of cultural specificity that just a few revisions could shift it to 1987 That sort of sparseness can be deliberate—a means of conveying timelessness—but here it just seems like a failure of imagination, turning Lila into an emblem rather than a girl."
Eventually Lila finds herself over her head when she finds herself alone with the older guys. Matt Seitz of "RogerEbert.com" describes the encounter but remains dissatisfied: "Several scenes in which Lila hangs out with Sammy and his buddies in a man-cave are mortifying. She is clearly an interloper, and they treat her like one, and somehow their snickering indifference and dimwit innuendo are part of the male-female dance in this world. Lila's closed-off expressions suggest that she if not welcomes, at least expects to be treated with contempt. These rec room scenes rank with the most pessimistic depictions of teen sexuality in recent cinema. Yet however heartfelt and keenly observed this pessimism is, it becomes monotonous.
A.A. Dowd of the "A.V. Club" gets to the essence of "It Felt Like Love's" limitations: "Lila, for all the authentic awkwardness Piersanti breathes into her, is defined so entirely by her mission—embarked upon with an equal measure of anxiety and anticipation—that she never quite comes alive as a character."
"It Felt Like Love" has some impressive cinematography but Ms. Hittman's one-note portrait of teenage obsession, prevents us from believing that these are real people. Nonetheless, I see good things for this director in the future, as this film still shows potential.