Head On

Alan Ball's Towelhead

by Cindy Fuchs

Recommended

"You're beautiful, just the way you are." So soothes Barry (Chris Messina), even as he suggests his girlfriend's 13-year-old daughter might be improved just a little, with his help. Jasira (Summer Bishil) agrees to his offer to shave her thick black pubic hair, as it's been causing her some embarrassment in gym class. She's a kid and wants to please Barry. But she doesn't see what you see. As he kneels, her gaze, fixed on an offscreen middle distance, reveals her own distress.

This image and others equally discomfiting form a kind of game in Towelhead, a movie that ostensibly tracks Jasira's responses to repeated bad behaviors by adults. Her narration, drawn largely from Alicia Erian's novel, grants her a childish wisdom, painting the adults as bumbling buffoons, while Jasira appears at once extraordinary and representative, perceptive and naïve. A half-Lebanese, half-white child living in the United States, circa 1990, she sees both limits and possibilities everywhere she looks. But the movie provides little context for her complicated view, surrounding her with the sorts of pathologically immature adults who tend to populate scathing memoirs.

These adults include Jasira's mother, Gail (Maria Bello). Discovering the discarded pubic hair, she blames her daughter for the violation ("There are right ways to act around men and there are wrong ways") and sends Jasira from Syracuse to Houston to live with her father. Though Jasira comprehends the injustice here, she also absorbs the guilt dumped on her, and sees her relocation as punishment. Indeed, Jasira's very conservative dad, Rifat (Peter Macdissi), is something like a warden, regulating her clothes, activities and friends.

As war looms in background headlines ("Hussein Calls Blockade an Act of War"), Rifat begins to compete with his cleft-chinned, Army reservist neighbor, Travis (Aaron Eckhart), over whose display of green-lawn patriotism is most sincere and well-tended. Travis' seduction of Jasira is predictable, premised on his sense of entitlement to her exotic beauty, so different from the girlies in his porn mags, but, in his mind, equally his.

When Jasira finds a more age-appropriate boyfriend in Thomas (Eugene Jones III), they embody the film's brief hope for a less angry, fearful and limiting future. Yet, as viewers of Towelhead must know (and Jasira, eternally ripe, brave and optimistic, will never know), that the future has only become more constricted.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

Towelhead| Written and directed by Alan Ball | A Warner Independent Pictures release