Ironically, it seems easier nowadays to see films of documentary
sex than of documentary tears (undoubtedly because the former
is more enjoyabhle to wach than the latter); this work, so full of
real tears of self-realization and healing, redresses the balance,
unexpectedly turning into a cleansing, liberating experience,
neither depressing nor exhibitionistic. This is a cinema of experience rather than entertainment. The filmmaker, a product
of the American documentary movement, places 20 California
adolescents in a week-long therapy setting in a rural retreat; all
action is spontaneous. After a series of innocuous interchanges,
more difficult areas are touched; a girl, called upon to strike her
"mother" (acted by another member of the group), cannot do so
in a poignant moment of impotent hesitation, and bursts into
tears; another girl realizes that she accepts all viewpoints because she herself has none; a boy discovers, among prolonged
sobbing, that one is ultimately alone. The sweet innocence of
sex, displayed by some, is revealed as repression; seemingly
real experiences emerge as frauds. At the end a black girl,
who never gave love because she never received any, finally lapses into a silence of self-realization so total that
it stuns. For staying with her face and ending the film
in this manner, we must thank a sensitive filmmaker
