All the Real Girls

David Gordon Green's All the Real Girls (2003) is a rumination on the idealistic impressions we all have of our first love. Concerned with the atmospherics of a first love, Green film’s examines what happens when two people desire different things in a relationship.

As a summary, it's almost too simplistic: Paul (Paul Schneider), the town Lothario, likes Noel (Zooey Deschanel), the virgin back from boarding school; Paul and Noel go out for a while; Paul loses Noel in a betrayal; Paul and Noel try again, but to disastrous results. Having already been the sexual adventurer in his past, Paul now desires affection and something greater than himself, and he sees that in Noel’s innocence. Unfortunately, Noel is altogether trusting in her desire to lose her virginity.

The film is comprised largely of short impressionistic scenes which, when taken together, reveal a North Carolinian rural community entirely deprived of genuine love. Couples rarely last and instead rotate sexual partners. Ordinary people struggle to articulate their mistakes, and more often end up traversing metaphors that are seldom apt. This inability to negotiate language results in the continual misreading of romantic situations, so that the right word is always articulated at exactly the wrong time.

The film’s cinematography is stellar, and the film plays like an ode to the classical structure of silent film. The virginal Noel leaves Paul and the town for a weekend and in turn loses her virginity, and when she returns home neither she nor Paul can reconcile their feelings with her betrayal, something that is akin, in Paul’s words, “to a mistake in nature.” Yet the film explores the falsity inherent to expecting another person to be the one who offers a cure to your own failings, since both Paul and Noel are ultimately damned not by each other, but rather by their own utterly human mistakes.

If there is a flaw to the film, it comes in our empathy in the final encounter between Paul and Noel, when both realize that they would have been perfect for one another at another time in their lives, just not at this time. The dialogue each character presents is so earnest and sincere that we mourn their failed relationship, and that the film does not end there, but rather drags to an end some minutes later on a more random shot, so that while this ending suggests an openness and a continued action, is a shame, since it is not the strongest shot.

Still, All the Real Girls is a film that is alternatively lyrical and thoroughly, purposefully mundane, and the cast of actors, including the always excellent Patricia Clarkson as Paul’s mother, beautifully realize every caveat of the film.

All the Real Girls: 10/10