Sacred Hearts (1995)

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Blistering performances.

I recently re-watched Looking For Alibrandi (1999/2000) which I experience as a pinnacle of coming of age stories. Josie is seventeen to eighteen. She gets to stand on her own two feet, even reconciling herself with her root cultures, while moving from a child type romantic love to a mature romantic love.Sacred Hearts. A seventeen, young woman, faces a range of difficult situations and comes out okay. Coming of age. There are questions about the perfection of her new love, her first ever romance, and he is getting ready to move out of town to do a two year degree in cookery. She now shares ownership of a second hand car.I then view Indian Paint (1965), a young man faces coming of age and wins the love of a pony.* Without considering those other features, I would rank this alongside Santa Fe (1997) as exploring a model of mental illness. Santa Fe is more detailed and both are approachable.In that aspect, I find Sacred Hearts to be a bit weaker. It shows a move to more solid ground, but without the hints of the key minefields. Whatever, the more solid ground as a help to moving towards more sensible approaches is only hinted at by the background of Santa Fe: the husband moving to a new job, starting at a lowly level. On this, Sacred Hearts does not really try, the story centres more on the young woman who is now established as no longer a girl, she has symbolic trouser skills.

TiVo grabbed this for me, thinking it was the other Sacred Hearts from 1984 starring Katrin Cartlidge. Anyway, once I started watching it slowly drew me in further and I couldn't stop. A couple of the actors weren't very good, but some of them did a fine job. The story and direction were good too. I was fascinated to learn from the end credits that it was filmed in the Evansville, Indiana area where I had lived for a few years. You don't find many movies that hail from Southern Indiana.

Makes me wish that everybody would react as calmly as Elizabeth. Although she's only 17, her parental interactions, for example, are quite laid back, but obviously genuinely caring. And she has much to care about: mom is in a mental hospital; dad has a gal-pal, then he receives surgery. In addition, there's her job; her boyfriend; and learning that her grandfather killed himself. It's a very slow-moving film, containing practically no action. THAT would be my biggest criticism. Definitely not the stereotypical "guy's flick". But, what might be some people's dullness, is exactly what I appreciated. It shows a restrained, yet attainable and desirable, real way of coping.