All This Panic (Jenny Gage, 2016)
I don't pretend I'm Margot Tenenbaum!Gage's camera follows seven girls from the middle of their high school years and into the first year of college. I couldn't help comparing the film to the 1982 documentary
Seventeen, which I watched as part of DOCember 2016. The two films are very different in their approach —
All This Panic focuses just on girls and covers a longer timespan in their lives, from the middle of high school to a year or so into college — but kids will still be kids, so certain things remain constant: sex, drugs, alcohol, popularity, existential ruminations about their place in the world, now and in the future, et cetera. It's tempting to attribute the different attitudes of each film's subjects to the generation gap — the girls of
All This Panic don't contradict any stereotype of millennials — but I wonder if those differences have less to do with time (1982 vs. 2017) than class and location. The kids in
Seventeen, as I remember them, were lower middle class, more or less, while the girls of
All This Panic seem more firmly middle class — but New York City middle class, which is perhaps a far cry from Muncie, Indiana middle class. If there's a greater sense of entitlement on display in
All This Panic, it doesn't serve as a critique of an entire generation; and it's also offset by a greater sense of hope and a stronger sense of empathy.
But I digress.
All This Panic is an extremely sunny film in its cinematography, a style which really adds to the sense of the fleeting nature of these years, as childhood slips away and adulthood looms nebulously. It's a nicely cast documentary — full of with appealingly articulate youths — though a few of the girls blended together for me. Only two of them really made enough of an impression to distinguish themselves. It's also never quite clear what if any the relationships exist between the girls. It's a film of snippets; a glimpse into this time and these lives. It's not really penetrating or incisive, and there's very little sense of an outside world, but it succeeds in creating an instant nostalgia for time that's not yet passed.
Total Bondo bait. Available on Kanopy.
Grade: B-
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