Tina Kakadelis
New Zealand summer takes place during the northern hemisphere’s winter. As someone who grew up on the Atlantic northeast, the thought of Christmas trees bathed in sunshine feels wrong. However, it does create this fascinating liminal experience for young people. Already, both summer and the week of Christmas to New Year’s feel hazy and out of time. To combine the two is a sensation that most Americans have never experienced. Paloma Schneideman’s SXSW-premiering film Big Girls Don’t Cry captures the restlessness of this time coupled with that same listlessness of adolescence.
Set over the course of six weeks, Big Girls Don’t Cry charts a turbulent time in fourteen-year-old Sid’s (Ani Palmer) life. She’s best friends with Tia (Ngataitangirua Hita), her neighbor down the street, and is anxiously awaiting the return of her sister Adele (Tara Canton) from university. Her father (Noah Taylor) is physically around, but emotionally absent. He’s clearly struggling to keep a roof over their heads, stuck doing physically demanding jobs when he wishes he could be making his art. All of this sets the backdrop for Sid’s exploration into sexuality, her identity, and adulthood through the early days of the internet.
Big Girls Don’t Cry opens with the sounds of dial up and the production company logos are slightly pixelated. Then, we see Sid sitting on a clunky desktop computer, surfing on the web to an Omegle-esque site. A naked man is on the other side of the screen, asking Sid to turn on her webcam. She lies and says it’s broken, but that doesn’t deter the man from jerking off. When it gets too weird for Sid, she shuts the computer and seemingly unfazed, makes her way to the living room. So many things like this happen to Sid throughout the film. She’s exposed to too much too soon and then expected to continue on her day like nothing happened. She has a curiosity for sex and uses the computer as an outlet for that interest. It speaks to this feeling that looms over a lot of technology. In theory, it could be a resource to encourage growth in a same, informative manner or it could provide an easy path to something darker.
Sid partakes in what could only be described as catfishing long before that was a term in the common vernacular. She uses Tia’s older brother’s AIM login to talk to Lana, the cute girl who rides her bus to school and will not give Sid the time of day. Like many queer kids of that generation, the internet provided a place to explore an identity. To put on a persona that they wish they could be. Let’s face it, the tragic, signature lesbian bowl cut of the early-aughts was not doing anyone any favors, but it does feel like a right of passage. To endure the awkwardness that comes with that floppy haircut which made it so easy to hide away from the world. It called no attention and those bangs allowed the little lesbian we all once were to have a barrier of sorts between us and the world around us.
Big Girls Don’t Cry is often punishing. Out of a desire to be included, to feel cool, to make a name for herself, Sid throws herself into a multitude of dangerous, uncomfortable situations. It’s the push and pull of both wanting to be included and be where she thinks she wants to be and the realization that she would much rather be anywhere else. That she feels safest with Tia, but is scared to see how people perceive her based on that. This idea of reinventing one’s self and the liminal nature of this holiday break creates a wide open sense of possibility for Sid to try on a different version of herself. One that gives her a taste of what her life could be if things were a little different. If there wasn’t so much sadness, isolation, and pain in her life, who knows who Sid could be.
The characters in Big Girls Don’t Cry are a beautiful reflection of the contradictions that exist in all of us. We can be kind, cruel, and scared, often all once. No character is one thing which creates this nuanced look of adolescence and the friction that we experience when we move from one part of our lives to the next. Big Girls Don’t Cry captures how humiliating it feels to be a teenager who just wants to be seen for themselves despite not knowing who they are.
