Young and Wild (2012)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This one was a surprise for me. I expect most foreign films to be good, but this one was really different, and make you really engage your brain. First of all, if you don't understand the language, you have to read subtitles, and there's such rapid dialogue, that you have to read fast or you'll miss out. Which means you tend to miss a bit of the visuals, but it can be done without missing too much. As for the story, it's fascinating, and pretty disturbing, to see the lengths an evangelical family will go to try to keep their daughter from having sex. Let's just say "slut shaming" is taken to an extreme level in this family. You can feel the poor girl's angst; it's not pleasant. This movie explores the darker side of growing up and trying to find one's place in the world. It's not for prudes or people afraid of human sexuality. 7/10 stars.

Ever since the surprise success of "Y Tu Mama Tambien", Latin American filmmakers have realized they can compete with Hollywood, and even successfully export Spanish-language films to North America, if they make films that contain a strong dose of the kind of sexual explicitness their more Puritanical northern neighbors tend to shy away from. Unfortunately, few of these films are nearly as good as "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and are more likely to approach the dismal depths of something like "Night Buffalo".This Chilean movie is about a girl in her late teens who is kicked out of her evangelical school for having sex and decides to start a blog to rebel against her community and overbearing religious mother. Her blog involves her talking about having all manner of sex (oral, anal, you name it) with partners of both genders. And, not surprisingly, a lot of this sex occurs on camera. The problem with this movie is it is neither fish nor fowl. It kind of wants to be a serious art film, but the character is just not particularly believable. Nothing that happens to her really justifies her rather extreme rebellion. The movie wants to take it as a given that religious repression will inevitably result in promiscuity and jaded sexual attitudes, but it doesn't SHOW how it happened with THIS character very convincingly. I would compare this movie--unfavorably--to the excellent Argentinean film "The Holy Girl", which much more believable portrays the nexus between religion and sex.The lead, Alicia Rodriquez, is definitely very cute, and with all the graphic sex scenes this movie could have at least been solid exploitation. But while it definitely has enough hot sex scenes to qualify, to really do this it would need to make the character LESS realistic and sympathetic and much more satirical. An example of this would be the recent US indie film "King Kelly" about very hot, but very stupid, fame-obsessed young woman who sets out to become an internet porn star. This movie is only slightly more realistic than that scathing satire, and it is also not as much fun.

The film was great for soft porn because that's exactly what it was. Those who thought it "sacrilegious" (at the Sundance Festival) should probably stick to romantic comedies and those who thought the film was original should probably watch more French cinema.You can sometimes overcome the soft porn classification with a rich storyline but this film doesn't have that. It has been made many times before—only better. The story: Protagonist, Daniela, is a girl raised in a religious Evangelical environment but wants to have sex with anything warm-blooded and human; girl finally gets a boyfriend; girl then finds a girlfriend too; girl suddenly wants to be baptized; boy finds out about same-sex encounters; boy leaves girl because boy is religious and ashamed.Daniela spends most of her time in this movie looking for sex and resisting her Evangelical surroundings. Her boyfriend finds out about the same-sex relationship because she spends much of her time blogging about it whenever she gets a chance. He tells her mother about it and dumps Daniela, thus also causing her to part ways with her mother. Young & Wild shifts from curious promiscuity, to sexual acts, to punishment (kicked out of school, of course), then adaptation (the boyfriend her mother accepts), to eventual sex with the boyfriend, and then to a contextual red herring that detracts from any promise of a clear message: The same-sex relationship. I didn't see that the film added anything different in terms of methodology or content, and it lacked a clear focus, starting with an implied struggle over theism, which ends quickly once we learn that the main character is not an atheist but only "afraid" to believe in God. This theme of fear, like many others, never resurfaces. We never learn how she copes with the dissociation from her family and church and never see the post-climactic dynamics between Daniela and her ex-boyfriend, or Daniela and her family. There were many opportunities here to do something interesting with the blogging aspect of the story (privacy and the naiveté of a young blogger), and lots could have been done to explore Daniela's mysterious and unrealized decision to be baptized. Young & Wild appears to be an indecisive agglomeration of three separate themes that the director should have narrowed down or conjoined in a more coherent manner: Soft Lolita porn, religious sexual dichotomy and bisexuality.

Young and wild is a film about adolescence, self-imposed boundaries, religion, and spirituality. Perhaps the unique hitch is that, rather than being told by a mature and seasoned (read curmudgeonly) adult, it is told unflinchingly through the eyes of its protagonist, a seventeen- year-old Chilean girl named Daniela. A local legend, even in real life, Daniela maintains a detailed blog of her sexual exploits and deepest thoughts. Through a creative use of Chilean pop-music, graphics, and editing, the audience is let into this world. The content of the film is shocking, explicit, and (at moments) even pornographic. Thus with a surface level look, it would be easy to condemn it on this basis, However, writing it off wholesale would risk losing the truth depicted in Daniela's personal spiritual struggle. Here we experience, as much as we can, what it feels like to be a teenager under the iron thumb of mature Christian shame (not Daniela's, but her mother's). While it is true that director Marialy Rivas goes over the top to be outrageous (I could not help but avert my eyes at certain moments), it is also true that if it wasn't explicit in some ways, it couldn't claim to tell Daniela's actual story from her perspective. Aside from my shock at the graphic sexuality, my primary emotional response to the film was sadness. As a human being, I too have lived in the tension of knowingly, willingly, happily stepping into wrong/unhelpful behavior (we call it 'sin' in the Christian world-view) and yet believed in and tried to follow a God who is not OK with that. I too have lived in the tension of being in a community in which I assumed that I was the only one to have shameful secrets. It is a lonely place to exist; and I don't think it has to be that way. Thus my sadness is twofold: for Daniela's despair and isolation (she eventually fully embraces her wild side admitting "I am Lost, I am Lost, I am Lost"), and for the ineptitude of the church to teach an open and humble path of living for real people who make mistakes that run the gamut of human experience. As a Christian pastor, it is on me to demonstrate authenticity and the kind of truth that Young and Wild explores.