Mei Makino’s coming-of-age drama depicts an artsy, biracial high school student grappling with the guilt of sleeping with another girl’s boyfriend.
Angie Chen (Emma Galbraith) trudges through multiple gray areas in “Inbetween Girl,” an intelligent teenage drama by the writer and director Mei Makino.
Half-Asian and half-white, Angie, 16, is the “token minority” student at her high school in Galveston, Texas, though she has never felt particularly Asian. Her identity crisis is exacerbated when her parents announce their divorce, and her father — who is originally from China — moves in with a Chinese woman and her Stanford-bound daughter.
Then Angie’s crush, Liam (William Magnuson) — the school heartthrob — appears outside her bedroom window. Liam’s girlfriend, Sheryl (Emily Garrett), is an Instagram model, but her Catholic beliefs frustrate his desire for physical intimacy. Liam turns to Angie instead, and though their first romp is predictably awful, they begin to carry on regular trysts in secret. The two fall into something like love.
Sheryl, it turns out, doesn’t lead the picture-perfect life Angie thinks she does, and complications ensue when Liam refuses to tell her the truth.
Amid her sexual awakening, Angie begins to grapple with feelings of guilt. Makino tracks her evolution through dreamy, meditative transitions that weave examples of Angie’s artistic output with roaming shots of Galveston. In these moments, Angie reflects on her troubles in voice-over drawn from video diary entries; they’re corny, yes, and they spell out Angie’s emotions a little too directly, but her youthful wisdom and vulnerability feel honest.
“Inbetween Girl” isn’t the only recent film to center the love life and inter-cultural hang-ups of a young Asian American woman (see “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “The Half of It”), but it might be the most profound. Though the dialogue is often hit-or-miss, this young adult drama doesn’t simply put a fresh spin on old tropes: It takes seriously the messiness of growing up, the hardest parts of which involve accepting life’s ambiguities.
Inbetween Girl
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
