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Dir: Catherine Hardwicke
With: Nikki Reed, Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Jeremy Sisto, Brady Corbet, Deborah Unger 100 mins, cert 18 www.foxsearchlight.com/ thirteen/:
In your face is where this movie's aimed. It's a flash, brash piece of provocation about how young girls' sexuality becomes live - like exposed electric wire - earlier than we like to think and how we contrive simultaneously to deny it and to fetishise and commercialise it. This is the dark side of Dawson's Creek and Buffy; it's the worst-case scenario emerging from the cute sleepover kits on sale in toyshops to nine-to-11-year-olds with their hair braids and makeup. But, more than that, it's a poignant presentiment of a certain sort of contempt with which girls can expect to be treated when they are their mothers' age.
Thirteen is directed by the former production designer Catherine Hardwicke, making her debut, and co-written by Hardwicke and the movie's star, Nikki Reed, who is now 15 years old, but looking an awful lot older. It is avowedly based on Reed's own recollection of the nightmare of drug abuse, despair and vulnerability into which she tipped over on becoming a teenager. Evan Rachel Wood plays Tracy, a normal American 13-year-old schoolgirl, reasonably content with her life until she becomes in awe of the way-cool, ultra- popular Evie (Reed), whose clothes and style make Tracy look pathetic - and she feels her inferiority like a paper-cut. So she blanks all her old friends and does...