''It Felt Like Love'' is a 2013 independent drama film, the first feature film directed by
Eliza Hittman
Eliza Hittman (born December 9, 1979) is an American screenwriter, film director, and producer from New York City. She has won multiple awards for her film '' Never Rarely Sometimes Always'', which include the New York Film Critics Circle Award ...
. It premiered at the
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival (formerly Utah/US Film Festival, then US Film and Video Festival) is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,66 ...
and was later acquired by
Variance Films
Variance Films is a privately held film distribution company founded in 2008 that uses an innovative model of self-distribution combined with select elements of traditional theatrical distribution to allow filmmakers to achieve quality theatrical ...
, receiving a
limited theatrical release
__FORCETOC__
Limited theatrical release is a film distribution strategy of releasing a new film in a few theaters across a country, typically art house theaters in major metropolitan markets. Since 1994, a limited theatrical release in the Unite ...
in March 2014.
The film follows the coming-of-age of teenager Lila as she riskily courts the attentions of an older boy.
Plot
Lila, a fourteen-year-old girl who lives in
Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
with her widowed father, wants to be like her more sexually experienced friend Chiara. Lila and Chiara are in the same dance class and are spending the summer preparing for a big performance. Although Chiara is more experienced, she has only made it to
third base
A third baseman, abbreviated 3B, is the player in baseball or softball whose responsibility is to defend the area nearest to third base — the third of four bases a baserunner must touch in succession to score a run. In the scoring system us ...
with her boyfriend Patrick. Lila likes to portray herself as similarly experienced, when in reality her primary exposure to sex is tagging along on Chiara and Patrick's outings and being an awkward bystander to the couple's public displays of affection. One day at the beach, Lila makes eye contact with the older and tough Sammy. Hearing that Sammy is the type of guy who will "sleep with anyone," Lila aggressively pursues Sammy, going to the arcade where he works and telling friends she is in a relationship with him. Sammy is clearly not interested in Lila and sees her as just a kid, but he does not outright reject her advances, either.
Lila increasingly puts herself in dangerously vulnerable situations in order to get Sammy's attention. She goes alone to Sammy's apartment, where Sammy is hanging out with his male friends as porn plays on the TV. At one point, Sammy's friends start making crude jokes about Lila giving all of the guys simultaneous oral sex. Lila, naive and hungry for male attention, goes along with the jokes. After this scene, Lila is shown taking a bus back to her home. The question of whether Lila actually did anything sexual with the guys is left open to interpretation. The film ends with the performance of Lila and Chiara's dance team, with visuals that underscore the rocky terrain of adolescence.
Cast
* Gina Piersanti as Lila
* Giovanna Salimeni as Chiara
*
Ronen Rubinstein
Ronen Rubinstein ( , he, רונן רובינשטיין ; born ) is an Israeli-born American actor, environmental activist and lead singer of the rock band Nights in Stereo. He is best known for his roles as T.K Strand in '' 9-1-1: Lone Star,'' ...
as Sammy
*Kevin Anthony Ryan as Lila's father
*
Jesse Cordasco as Patrick
* Nicolas Rosen as Devon
* Case Prime as Nate
Production
Hittman utilized the microblogging website
Tumblr
Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...
as part of the casting process for the film. Filming took place in the summer of 2012, lasting 18 days with a crew of 11 people.
Release
''It Felt Like Love'' premiered at the
2013 Sundance Film Festival
The 2013 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 17, 2013, until January 27, 2013, in Park City, Utah, United States, with screenings in Salt Lake City, Utah, Ogden, Utah, and Sundance, Utah.
The festival had 1,830 volunteers.
Films
A r ...
, and subsequently screened at such festivals as
International Film Festival Rotterdam
The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) is an annual film festival held at the end of January in various locations in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Since its foundation in 1972, it has maintained a focus on independent and experimental fi ...
,
Maryland Film Festival
The Maryland Film Festival is an annual five-day international film festival taking place each May in Baltimore, Maryland. The festival was launched in 1999, and presents international film and video work of all lengths and genres. The festival ...
and
Giffoni Film Festival
The Giffoni International Film Festival is an Italian children's film festival which takes place annually in Giffoni Valle Piana, Campania. It began in 1971. The Giffoni International Film Festival typically has around 100,000 guests and has had ...
. It was acquired by
Variance Films
Variance Films is a privately held film distribution company founded in 2008 that uses an innovative model of self-distribution combined with select elements of traditional theatrical distribution to allow filmmakers to achieve quality theatrical ...
in November 2013 for a limited theatrical release on March 21, 2014.
The film was released on video by
Kino Lorber
Kino Lorber is an international film distribution company based in New York City. Founded in 1977, it was originally known as Kino International until it was acquired by and merged into Lorber HT Digital in 2009. It specializes in art house films, ...
on July 29, 2014.
Reception
''It Felt Like Love'' received critical acclaim. On review aggregator website
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
, the film has an approval rating of 84% based on 25 reviews. Writing for ''The New York Times'', Jeannette Catsoulis said the film is "a mood poem to summer loving and sexual awakening...powerfully
vokinga time when flesh is paramount, and peer behavior is the standard by which we judge our own".
She noted Hittman and cinematographer
Sean Porter "remind us of the dangers of teenage desire and...the vast gulf between male and female notions of romantic connection".
Of the film, Inkoo Kang of the ''Los Angeles Times'' said, "Rarely has the zone between girlhood and womanhood been captured with such urgent honesty than in Eliza Hittman’s superb teen drama...Hittman’s debut isn’t just a brilliantly tactile study of the mounting sexual curiosity and frustration of 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti); it’s also an important landmark in the oft-ignored subgenre of realistic movies about female adolescence".
Writing for
RogerEbert.com,
Matt Zoller Seitz
Matt Zoller Seitz (born December 26, 1968) is an American film and television critic, author and film-maker.
Career
Matt Zoller Seitz is editor-at-large at RogerEbert.com, and the television critic for '' New York'' magazine and Vulture.com, as ...
praised the film as "tremendously accomplished", but also said the film falls short of a fuller character study.
References
External links
*
*
*
''New Yorkers Richard Brody discusses ''It Felt Like Love'' at Maryland Film Festival 2013*
{{Eliza Hittman
2013 films
American independent films
Films directed by Eliza Hittman
Variance Films films
2013 independent films
2013 directorial debut films
2013 drama films
Films produced by Shrihari Sathe
Juvenile sexuality in films
Films about adolescence
2010s coming-of-age drama films
Films set in Brooklyn
Films about puberty
2010s English-language films
2010s American films