Erin’s Guide To Kissing Girls

There’s a great rush of excitement which accompanies a successful coming out as a teenager – joy at being accepted, relief at no longer having to second guess one’s every action, delight at the freedom with which one can now approach the people one desires. Actually approaching them, however, remains as awkward as it is for anyone else that age, and that awkwardness increases with the intensity of one’s feelings. What’s more, at a stage in life when one still has very little social freedom, friendships also involve strong feelings and require a lot of attention. When lacking in experience, it’s easy to get the balance wrong.

Having come out the summer before this film begins, 14-year-old Erin (Elliot Stocking) is the token queer kid at her middle school. This means putting up with homophobic jokes which are painful not so much because of the sentiment they reflect as because of their poor quality. She doesn’t suffer serious bullying, perhaps because she’s demonstrated a measure of confidence, but she’s still very much a part of the out crowd, partly because she’s also a nerd. She and best friend Liz (Jesyca Gu) are obsessed with a particular comic, and Erin creates her own fan fiction based on it. They’ve got along happily like this for some time, but there’s a cloud on the horizon: Liz has been accepted into an elite athletic-focused high school and Erin is afraid of what that will mean.

Everything changes the day that Sydni (Rosali Annikie) arrives in their class. She’s the child star of a popular TV show, which means that initially everybody wants to be her friend, but they also want to call her by her character’s name and make constant references to it, which she’s sick of. When she responds spikily, we see a different side of her. This is the kind of girl who will spend detention going through the teacher’s desk and stealing her sweets. She won’t let anybody get the better of her, and Erin is instantly smitten.

Naturally, the course of true love does not run smooth – if it even is true love. Erin’s ideas about how to romance girls are based on comics and hand-me-down plots from Eighties movies. She’s ready to jump in feet first before she’s even determined whether or not Sydni likes girls. (The fact that if Sydni does like girls she still might not be attracted to Erin is overlooked, which feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity.) Her obsession squeezes Liz out of her life and prevents her from noticing the damage she’s doing. Stocking does a good job of creating a character who is sympathetic and likeable but also utterly self-centred.

There are a lot of nicely observed little details. Erin’s railing against heterosexual imagery wherever she finds it is the subject of affectionate humour, yet the film still serves to highlight that quiet propaganda and the damaging effect if can have. The school dance looks more like a real school dance than almost any other yet committed to film, hammering home the difference between the lifestyle Erin feels she ought to have and what teenage life is actually like. Adult characters are a bit more three dimensional than in a lot of such work, and even the school’s cliquey girls are portrayed with some sympathy – a lot of the time it’s Erin who runs roughshod over their feelings rather than the other way round, even if she’s not aware of that.

Whilst Annikie works well enough with what she’s given, her character feels underdeveloped, Erin’s ideas about her leaving little room for the real girl to come into focus. Liz is realised rather more effectively, thanks to a standout performance from Gu. The film’s message - that it’s okay to forego the dramatic stuff and just figure things out over time – feels almost too reasonable and wholesome for a teen film, but it’s effectively delivered, and this should hit the spot with audiences slightly younger than its characters who are just beginning to have to deal with similar situations.