Party Girl

We were pretty excited when we heard about How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2018) - a film based on a punk rock short story by Neil Gaiman, directed by John Cameron Mitchell (of Hedwig’s Angry Inch). It wasn’t quite as amazing as it could have been, but we were glad we watched it.

It’s about 3 British high-school punks in 1977, AJ Lewis is the slick confident one with the bleached Mohawk, Ethan Lawrence is the chubby “social liability, and Alex Sharp as Enn, the protagonist. He is probably most serious about punk, writes a fanzine and draws comics. They go to a punk show being promoted by Nicole Kidman, playing Boudicca, a sort of Malcolm McLaren/Vivienne Westwood promoter and fashion plate, stuck being the big frog in little pond Croyden.

The boys hear about an after party, but get lost on the way and find an odd house. The girl in the fancy vinyl dress at the door let them in, and they go looking for the band. Instead they find some wierd stuff - mostly dead-faced men and women in vinyl fetishware, dancing to odd space music. Lewis tries to get friendly with the girl from the door, Lawrence gets into the dancing, and Sharp finds a girl all alone, because one finger splits into two fingers at the end, which is considered an imperfection.

He’s a little freaked out, and likes it better when he meets Elle Fanning, who is getting browbeaten by her elders. When she takes scissors to her party frock (at least she isn’t wearing vinyl), he teaches her about non-conformism and punk - which she’s never heard of. I guess her people are more into krautrock (a movie in-joke). So he invites her to hang out with him and go to a punk show.

They go home together, and his sweet old horny mother is pleased to meet her. Then they spend a day doing punky things - hanging out and going to record stores. They go to the show and get dragged into an open mike, where they improvise a song together - it’s kind of punk. It also puts them into a dream world together, where only they exist, surrounded by cells and microscopic worlds, or something.

You see, these strange people are aliens - as you figure out pretty quick. They are on Earth to live the human experience, and then there will be a big feast. SPOILER- they aren’t going to eat the punks, it isn’t a cookbook. Everything is more or less explained, which is my least favorite part of the movie.

It’ s all a touch didactic, with lessons about free will and non-conformity and being human and punk. I liked it better when it was mostly a mystery. Also, there isn’t as much real punk as you might expect. The sound track tends toward “krautrock”, a 70s term for sort of arty, proggy, trance electronic sounds from outer space being made in Germany for a while. The band Matmos does the score, who are electronica, and pretty krautrock.

The story, of course, is a familiar one. We thought of Romeo and Juliet and Roman Holiday (now on the list). But really, this movie isn’t about the story, it’s about the feels. Alex Sharp doesn’t just look kind of like John Cusack, he also looks kind of like Neil Gaiman. Emma is both the good girl who is looking to rebel, and the good girl the (male) viewer knows would fall for him if she just checked out his radical music/lifestyle. So, again, a little didactic or schematic, but heartfelt. This part worked for me.

But my favorite part was just the boys poking around in that old house, opening doors at random and finding odd rituals, communal dancing, sexual oddities or political arguments going on. It is kind of dreamlike and crazy, and that’s what my experience with trying to talk with girls at parties was.