This, the first full-length dramatic feature by documentarist Joyce Chopra, is two-thirds of a very fine film. Oddly enough, those two-thirds are hardly more than preludial padding in front of the Joyce Carol Oates short story (Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?) on which the movie is based: just the thing, in other words, for capturing the improvisatory drift of teenagers on summer vacation -- when already a high-school freshman can start to pass herself off as a sophomore, and when any teenager worth her salt would rather hang out around the shopping mall or hamburger joint than help her mother repaint the house. "I look at you. I look right in your eyes," the mother in question says levelly, "and all I see is a bunch of trashy daydreams." The movie, among its numerous accuracies, is pretty nearly definitive on the contrast between the demeanor of a teenage girl at home, under the eye of parents and older sister -- "Just holding up the walls," as she likes to put it -- and her demeanor anywhere else. It is not just, although partly, a matter of the outer shirt that suddenly becomes extraneous and the skimpy halter-top that suddenly becomes sufficient, or the makeup and jewelry that suddenly become essential, or the talk about "buns" and "balls" that now rolls so easily off the tongue. It is all those things and more. The director being female herself no doubt helps with this sort of observation, and it is worth repeating that she is, or has been, a documentarist. The final half-hour is something else again. Something almost like another movie altogether. Something about some sort of Demon of the First Time, a symbolic and satanic deflowerer dressed in sunglasses and rolled-up short sleeves, driving a convertible, inexplicably knowing everything there is to know about the flattered and befuddled heroine: "I've been watching you." Nothing in this last half-hour can subtract from what came before; it just can't add. Laura Dern, Mary Kay Place, Treat Williams. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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