Soundtrack to Sixteen is a perfectly unobjectionable story about two straight teenagers who’ve become entangled in an unhealthy relationship of codependence. It is a Frankenstein’s monster of other trendy high school/20 something hipster romcom movies like Perks of Being a Wallflower, Eighth Grade, 100 Days of Summer, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (I assume?), Lady Bird, Miss America, and Australian indie darling Girl Asleep. I’m a little confused, once again, by why it is showing up in a 2021 Cinejoy festival, because it premiered nearly two years ago, but we’re going to put that aside. This movie is notionally about the music that makes up one boy’s year in high school, although in every way that matters it is really an afterthought. The plot is episodic and is structured on quick transitions to each month of the school year in the life of two Tenth Years, let’s say, starting A levels.
I like movies that try to give a glimpse into what high school feels like, the photo-realism of a bunch of stern first day of school speeches, the mounds of unbelievably heavy-looking 3-ring binders, the obviously uncool “cool” kids acting like assholes in libraries. At the same time, there is no point in the course of this movie when we see teachers do anything but pass poor grades to students as they are walking through the halls before disappearing into their classrooms. They don’t teach. They don’t chaperone. They really don’t speak (not even to offer advice while smoking cigarettes) except to indicate that This Is A Moment When We’re At School.
The two protagonists’ problems are kind of perfect: Ben self-identifies as a nerd, but he’s not actually that great at studying and he doesn’t have discipline or work-ethic (it makes for a nice contrast with his friends who come off as nerds too, but do surprisingly well when they’re released into the wild at a party). Maisy really doesn’t have any personality traits that are destructive. Her problems arise when her group of friends mischaracterize her as a late-bloomer and she kind of rebels by falling in with a new crew of girls who get off on making her do their chores and sleep on the floor at slumber parties, which is pretty fucked up. When Maisy tries to repair her previous relationship, she can’t because feelings have been hurt, and so she’s increasingly isolated and forced into a codependent relationship with a boy who doesn’t really like her but feels like he’s being successful at something when he’s with her. You know, being sixteen.
The issue–or one of the issues–with dramatizing all that is that Ben’s “studying” is not that cinematically interesting to watch, so we end up with a lot (maybe too many) quick cuts of him struggling to pay attention while glowering into a book. The voice overs redeem a little bit of it, but there’s no new material here, and so it just seems like an extended exercise in a compulsory high school movie moment.
By the way, what time is it? there are CDs but Maisy also has an Apple laptop that isn’t the size of a briefcase? The phones are ancient but omnipresent? They use messenger but they exchange numbers? His friends are playing on GameBoys talking about trading second generation Pokémon back and forth and the music doesn’t appear to have aged past 1999, but gosh were cell phones and computers that common? No one does their homework on laptops, but the lack of family laptops is really distracting. And was wifi a thing in 1999? I feel like there should be a lot of ethernet cords everywhere? But then they’re listening to music on their phones, not Walkmans, aren’t they?
The sound dubbing–in the train–is not great. The voice overs in general are clever, and the sheer length of some of the wordless scenes is pretty impressive (I’m thinking of the time that Maisy and Ben meet on the bus and the time that Ben starts to wig out while listening to a lecture on Macbeth). For a mostly redundant movie of low artistic value with few pop culture observations, this was surprisingly enjoyable to watch, a movie that I think would do well in a high school movie festival.
