Halfway through “Pen15″ comes a scene we’ve seen a million times before. A teenager, fumbling to understand their own changing body, figures out that masturbating can feel amazing, only to have their well-meaning mother open the door and catch them in the act. This pubescent horror story is so ubiquitous onscreen that it’s practically become a requisite in most any coming of age story, but there’s one basic, crucial difference between that cliché and “Pen15’s” take. That humiliated teen is almost always a boy. “Pen15,” by deliberate contrast, hands that scene over to a girl, who’s embarrassed and terrified and secretly thrilled to have figured out what she can do for herself, without any help at all.
“Pen15” flips the adolescent script like this so many times with such clever insight that it can genuinely become disorienting after a lifetime of never seeing anything quite like it onscreen.
“Pen15” flips the adolescent script like this so many times with such clever insight that it can genuinely become disorienting after a lifetime of never seeing anything quite like it onscreen.
- 2/8/2019
- by Caroline Framke
- Variety Film + TV
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