It Felt Like Love
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It Felt Like Love
2013. USA. Directed by Eliza Hittman. Awkwardly adrift one summer in the seaside districts of South Brooklyn, 14-year-old Lila (newcomer Gina Piersanti, in a raw, startling debut) tries to mimic the cool of her precocious older best friend as she gropes toward sexual awareness by way of one local boy. In her first feature, director Hittman exhibits a real formal control, while Piersanti brings a heartbreaking impassivity to her character. Hittman keeps a cool, analytical distance from her protagonist’s bad behavior while evocatively accessing her interior states through expert framing and expressive sound design. A Sundance 2013 premiere that has been a hit at U.S. and international festivals, It Felt Like Love has earned comparisons to the work of Lynne Ramsay and Catherine Breillat even as Hittman’s take on adolescent female sexuality and New York’s working-class neighborhoods contain an approach and imagination that’s wholly original. 82 min.