Feminist cinema has and always really will be, co opted by well meaning but obvious self serving men. This still happens today but under the vests of ‘femos’ (a term that is rather funny and idiotic in equal measure).  Add to this the framework, the rather dubious readings that hang around films of the feminist bent and you can see why SMOOTH TALK rerelease, is both exciting and concerning to the film fan and critic alike. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s celebrated short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” This is the debut narrative film from Joyce Chopra.

Laura Dern is Connie, a fifteen-year-old girl who is half out in the world and half fighting her family to be so. Summertime is fun and sun, with beach trips, mall hangouts, and innocent flirtations on the top of her things to do. This seems all life is until that is she meets a mysterious stranger (Treat Williams). He is menacingly unsettling and obsessive, with a desire to do something awful.

SMOOTH TALK shimmers with the tension of a family coming to terms with what their children are and where they will go. This won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, in many ways because it dared to explore the tension by revealing the thrill and terror of adolescence. The Gential stage of psychodynamic psychology, writ large with sexual exploration, adult conflict and physical / mental evolution. Landing into a space that reflects potently on the dynamics of gender in a world of small towns and even smaller spaces to define yourself. Williams is excellent as the unbalanced man of many menaces. But Dern is the catalyst for who the film lands, how it connects and ultimately, why it is so very good.

Criterion have dug deep, polished it up and then padded it a little with very good extras. There are a few issues in terms of colour bleed at many of the later scenes but overall, as other publications will express, it delivers. The extras are more of the thinking person format. Conversation between the artists at New York Film Festival, shifts slowly in its sands of feminist thought, coming of age dramas and how to frame all of these ideas while talking to the audience and not shouting at them. The better conversations can be found in the New conversations between Chopra and actors Treat Williams and Mary Kay Place. Here they seem to delve deeper. Dig further and its Chopra holding Williams to his performance, really hits home the power of the ending. Watch this after the film to get the maximum feel.

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