My review of the Dakota Skye DVD posted to PopMatters yesterday. Because this is a small film that many will not have seen, here's a one-line synopsis and excerpt from the review. It's essentially a young adult romantic comedy, but low-key and with a particular wrinkle: the female hero has the power to discern when people are lying. While this conceit creates some problems for the narrative, it also opens up some interesting possibilities:
Indeed, the most important function of Dakota’s truth-seeing is that
it gives the filmmakers the freedom to develop her as a complex
teen/young adult, and not reduce her to a girl looking for love. During
the course of the movie, she engages in a number of behaviors largely
forbidden to female romantic leads. She ditches her friends. She cheats
on her boyfriend with his best friend, and does so without any overt
displays of guilt. She continues to act as a dutiful girlfriend after
the infidelity. She appears to enjoy sex.
In the moral economy of teen romantic comedies and coming of age
films, any one of these acts would usually be enough to mark her as a
bad girl, or at least as too blemished to be the hero. Here, her power
not only makes her, by definition, extraordinary, but the particular
nature of her ability means that she always has her own, good and
demonstrable, reasons for what she does. She knows, in a real way, that
Kevin’s feelings for her are shallow, that her friends are aggravated
by her, and that people, boys and men in particular, will say all kinds
of things if they think it will result in sex. All of these insights,
and the fact that they are shared with the audience, make her behaviors
understandable in ways that they normally would not be on screen, even
though in the real world of teenagers, they are all common enough.
Read the full review.
PopMatters home.
Originally posted on:
Short-Circuit Signs