![]() ![]() But not even the popularity of Clueless, Juno, Mean Girls, Freaky Friday et al has been persuasive enough to inspire a copycat genre in the UK. Though the idea of the teenager was based on American, male archetypes, from Huck Finn to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, US cinema has since developed a lucrative girl-centred high school strand. We can usually find a reason to blame Hollywood for long-running, ostensibly lazy trends, but that doesn't bear out in this case. Which probably doesn't help character development or any of those little details which contribute to creating memorable heroines."īurchill may be being deliberately provocative, but it is true that when girls do appear in teen films they're either soft-focus objects of desire, or all-too-sensible maternal moppers-up, there to emphasise the stupidity of their male peers. "I think they probably have a real difficulty in seeing beyond the physical. "Teenage girls tend to be so beautiful and film directors, who are nearly always male, tend to be such lechers," she says. To which Julie Burchill, whose candid 2004 teen novel Sugar Rush proved such a hit with young girls, offers a rather withering observation. ![]() ![]() This was a comedy about a group of archetypes really." The parameters of a St Trinian's film are already there – it has to be girls and they have to be sexy. "These characters weren't meant to be real. Piers Ashworth, the screenwriter of St Trinian's, proudly describes the boarding school movies as "girl-power films" and claims: "We'd never ever seen that in British cinema before or since." But he also admits his all-male team of writers did only "small amounts of research" because they weren't especially concerned with hitting emotional or nostalgic chords. Which is why Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, Menhaj Huda's Kidulthood, Gurinder Chadha's Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, Sandra Goldbacher's Me Without You and even the revived St Trinian's comedies, perhaps the closest female equivalent to The Inbetweeners, stand out so alarmingly. Right back to the angry young men of the early 1960s, British films about young people have almost always been about boys. Further back there are This Is England, Sweet Sixteen, Billy Elliot, Trainspotting, Gregory's Girl, Quadrophenia and Kes. As well as The Inbetweeners, in the recent past we've had Attack the Block, Neds, Harry Brown, Nowhere Boy and Submarine. It's also rites-of-passage films, teen-scene hipster movies, hoodie horrors – you name it. It's not just genital-warts'n'all British teen comedies that steer clear of girls. Many saw our male counterparts weep with laughter and recognition at The Inbetweeners, and thought: "I must dig out some DVDs that bring back memories of my hilariously embarrassing, hormone-addled schooldays." A browse of the video cabinet and brought it home there aren't any British films meeting that need. ![]() Well, one reason might be that they are female. Why wouldn't film-lovers flock to see such a formative part of their lives recreated so authentically, to spend a couple of happy hours revelling in "thank God it's not just me" camaraderie (for youngsters) or "thank God it's over" nostalgia (for older ones)? A funny, frank film about adolescence that got everything right – the phoney, peer-pleasing, "street" jargon the perpetually nagging fear of inadequacy, perked up by flashes of hope and well-oiled fantasy the humiliations ladled out by bodies commanded by the whiff of sex. The box-office success of The Inbetweeners Movie may have taken the film industry by surprise, but for many of its audience it was a no-brainer. ![]()
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