All the Real Girls DIR David Gordon Green; SCR David Gordon Green; PROD Jean Doumanian, Kimberly Jose, Lisa Muskat, Derrick Tseng. US, 2003, color, 108 minutes.
Teenaged Noel (Zooey Deschanel) returns home from boarding school and slides deeply into a relationship with her older brother’s friend, Paul (Paul Schneider), amidst their small-town factory milieu. Their relationship blossoms into that rare instance of genuine, giddy, butterflies-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach love that magnetizes two people completely without expectation. Sibling protectiveness and romantic rivalry threaten to undermine the relationship’s fragile beginning but are secondary to the more powerful chaos of the lovers’ own impurities. Green’s poetic, atmospheric sensibilities of the small moments and surreal details in the margins of life, Tim Orr’s subtly panoramic cinematography, and Zene Baker and Steven Gonzales’ editing (which allows scenes to breathe and take weight) are enough to make All the Real Girls an extremely interesting film, but it is the film’s brutally relatable authenticity about the joyous and painful motions of young, tender, immature love that makes the film utterly captivating, intense, and indelible.
Justin Baker