About a girl

  As the titles appear at the start of the film, they come up on the screen just like a text message would and this gives the impression that the film is going to be about a teenage girl. The title “About a girl” is very similar to the title of the film “About a boy”, so possibility the two films are going to be quite similar. As the film progresses, you see that the two films are quite like each other as they both focus on the main characters’ stories.

  In the first scene of the film, the girl is seen dancing and singing in a field on her own around sunset. From this we can see that she seems like a typical girl, but also wonder where her family are as she shouldn’t be out on her own late at night as she’s vulnerable. Her identity is not given to us until the next scene, as is this scene we only see a silhouette of her and this makes us wonder what is really looks like. She’s also singing stronger by Britney Spears which she also sings again a few times as the film goes on.

  During the next shot, we see the girl again, but this time she seems almost like a different person. She is portrayed in the shot as being a very strong person and she also seems very mature. The first piece of dialogue she says is: “If Jesus was alive today right, he’d probably be a singer” -  A lot of girls say that when they grow up that they want to be singers and because she probably wants to be a singer herself, this is why she would have said this. Later on in the film we find out that she has started a girl band with some friends of hers.

   Her parents are divorced and it’s clear that this has had an impact on her life. She refers to her dad as being a “bustard”, as this is what her mum calls him. She does see her dad, but he doesn’t seem to have a lot of time for her and the relationship they have together seems to be forced as they know they both should see each other, but don’t really want to.

  She has had a very hard up-bringing and she sort of seems lost in life. Her strong personality though helps her to get on with life and when she is singing and having a laugh with her friends, you see that she’s just a normal girl.

  The way in which the film ended was such a shock to me when I saw it. Towards the end of the film, she starts talking about different chocolate bars and then went on to talk about when she had a dog for a while, but as her mum didn’t know about it to start with, they had to get rid of it. They put the dog into the cannel.  At the end of the film, she puts a bag into the cannel and afterwards we see that it’s a baby. We never really see the lower half of her body in the film, so you say that the baby was probably hers. As she had difficult relationships with her parents, she probably didn’t want to baby to experience that. After this, she continues to talk about chocolate bars and ice-cream as if nothing happened.

  I think this was a great film as you really get to know the character throughout as even though it’s a drama, it’s sort of in a documentary style. It’s a typical British film as it’s very gritty throughout and the lighting is very grey throughout.