I read the book a couple weeks ago, and saw this movie this weekend. I really liked it. It’s the story of a 13 year old girl, Jasira, whose mother ships her off to live with her Lebanese dad (she’s half-Lebanese) because her mother’s boyfriend starts taking an interest in the girl (shaves her pubes for her, for example). Great parenting. Strict father isn’t much better as she navigates her sexual awakening. In the meantime, the first Gulf War is going on, and she’s living in Texas, often the victim of bigotry.
A great deal of sexual molestation/non-consensual sex. (Well, by definition, since she’s 13.) In the movie, Aaron Eckhart plays a neighbor who victimizes her. They do a good job (both movie and book) of showing how she really likes him (she’s attracted to him, and he’s one of the few adults giving her positive attention) but at the same time how he’s taking advantage of a young girl’s trust. And somehow, Eckhart succeeds, again, at making a slimey character sort of likable.
I got the sense from reading reviews of the movie (Ebert’s in particular) that it made a lot of people uncomfortable–Ebert kept saying he thought it could’ve been handled way more sensitively.
I thought a lot of it was creepy, but at the same time it made sense. What about it felt prurient? Was it more all the bad things that happened to Jasira, or was it that she herself seemed too sexual? As a (former) 13 year old girl, I didn’t think that was so off. I didn’t read Playboys like she did, but I did love to masturbate…a lot. And I was definitely at the age where I was getting crushes/mini obsessions on older guys. I do suspect that if pretty much every adult in my life treated me/my sexuality like it was aberrant, I’d have been grateful and curious about an older guy paying that kind of attention to me. But of course, as the neighbor, Melina, points out, any guy who wants to prey on a 13 year old girl like that is pervy.
I dunno Freudian, like I said I’m an out of touch 53 year old – I can barely remember when my own kid was 13. It wasn’t Jasira’s sexual awakening, though, that skeeved me out. I expected that. It just seemed like the book was a little breathless about it, especially with regards to her encounters with the neighbor. It also seemed like sex was the only thing going on in her life. Maybe that’s an accurate picture, but if so, it isn’t sufficiently interesting to hold my attention.
Yeah, that’s true…if I were a guy, I think I’d be wondering, “Wow, do girls really think like that?” since we often get the impression that it’s guys who have “impure” thoughts and all that. It’s definitely way more explicit than most books I read when I myself was 13, but I’m pretty sure I would’ve devoured this one, too, at that age.
Plus, reading it made me super grateful for my own parents…you don’t really get much worse than the selfish excuses for skins that Jasira has as her birth-givers.
Just saw the movie and, to be honest, it was one of the few films I’ve ever seen that I actively hated. I don’t mean I disliked it, or that I didn’t like it. I mean that the movie was repulsive. Even if it was the point, the fact that the sex with the neighbor made my skin crawl was not a plus, at all.
I also found the actress to be so horrible at acting that she was almost painful to watch.
CAVEAT: I’m not a teenaged Arab girl living in Texas with a single father.
I watched the DVD over the past weekend. It gave me one thing I like occasionally from a book or movie, a plausible view of how another segment of the population lives. Due to the caveat, I can’t be sure it was realistic. It wasn’t a “fun” film. Could that be what its like for someone who is an outsider at school and an outsider in her home? I think so. Is that what life is like for everyone in that situation? Definitely not.