The directing debut of the screenwriter of American Beauty, Alan Ball, concerns itself, in a bland beige image, with the sexual experiences of an Arab-American eighth-grader in suburban Houston during the first Gulf War, and with little else. Sex and the Single-Minded Girl: pubic shaving, first period, girlie magazines, masturbation, molestation, defloration, orgasms, condoms, tampons, or in sum, more and in greater detail than you’d care to know. The heroine’s ethnicity adds a couple of extra ingredients (a Medieval father, racism), and the emergence of characters and their personalities, along with the formation of relationships and alliances between them, imparts a rudimentary narrative interest. Summer Bishil, twenty years old in real life (should you be worried about the groping and disrobing), plays the lead role with a docile inhibition that painfully underlines the vulnerability. If, after the title, you were in any doubt that this is an Edgy Indie, the dead kitten in a Baggie in the freezer will clinch the deal. Peter Macdissi, Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bello. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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