"It was nothing. It still is nothing."

Prospective viewers of the film LITTLE DARLINGS (1980) should heed the warning on the promo poster: don’t let the title fool you. The standard summertime coming-of-age story is elevated to a new level by a raw, unvarnished production style. The focus is on fifteen-year-old girls Angel and Ferris, attending summer camp away from home for the first time. What a pleasure it is to see a film where the characters are played by young actors who actually look their age! While the film never misses a chance to revel in clumsy humor, it also treats the characters with dignity and refuses to allow the scenario to deteriorate into a farce. The tone of the story is pitch-perfect and will ring true with anyone who survived adolescence.

Angel is a rough tomboy who shuns cliquish chatter about boys and clothes. Ferris is a preppy princess too fragile for dirt and outdoor sports. Both are marginal characters in the camp society, and their position is exploited a devious sexpot named Cinder. She invents an amusing summer diversion for her bunkmates: they will wager on which girl will lose her virginity first. After Ferris emerges as the betting favorite, Angel rises to the challenge. Ferris and Angel cast about for targets of their seduction. Over-confident Ferris chooses the much-older sports coach. She bats her eyelashes, shows off her French, and fakes a drowning in an attempt to win his attention. Meanwhile, Angel gathers a posse and sneaks over to the boys’ camp on the other side of the lake. There she encounters bad-boy Randy, who has the same shag haircut as she does, and the sparks fly between them. The race is on to see who will land her man first.

Their bunkmates act as a Greek chorus, egging on the girls when they lose their nerve and offering well-meaning but misguided advice. There is much hilarity as they spout misinformation in the form of literary clichés, urban legends, old wives’ tales, and superstitions. Eventually they begin to feel guilty over their role in the bet. “Maybe losing your virginity should be a private thing?” wonders one of the girls. But it’s too late. Friendships, reputations, and a lot of cash are riding on what happens. The film's scenario represents the vested interest of peers and society in sex as performance. It offers an astute commentary on how the private sexual experiences of teens are appropriated by the public sphere, in the media, politics, and religion.

The film’s brilliance lies in recognizing that for Ferris and Angel, sex boils down to a struggle to validate their identity. Ferris suffers from a nebulous confusion between fantasy and reality. In acting out her Harlequin daydreams, she wants to shed her false sophistication and overcome her reputation as the annoying rich girl. Angel has inherited a crude view of romance from her cynical mother and is desperate to be seen as more than just a sex object. When she baits Randy with the accusation, “I’m not sexy to you,” she is devastated when he replies, “All girls are sexy.” Both Ferris and Angel fight to assert their personhood through sex, and each discovers in her own way that even when you are as close as you can possibly be to another person, you can still be very lonely.

The tragedy of modern adolescence portrayed in the film is that the girls are wise beyond their years and know more than they should. Both girls have a complicated family life. On Family Day, Ferris’s father breaks the news that her mother has left for Reno. “But people get divorced in Reno!” exclaims Ferris. Angel interrogates her mother about how she lost her virginity and receives a very disillusioning response. For the viewer, there is a constant nagging horror that the girls are too young to handle the situations they have been thrust into. When Angel has an epiphany and exclaims, “I’m not a woman!” we know it has come to her at a great cost.

There are many layers of meaning in LITTLE DARLINGS. Superficially it has a wholesome, unpretentious charm. It vividly captures the exquisite awkwardness of growing up. The plot is enjoyable, full of cutesy food fight, campfire songs, and oddball costumes. However, the self-conscious scenes of sun-kissed girls frolicking in the blooming outdoors lend an unsettling element of a pastoral Eden just waiting for the Fall. There is a creepy and titillating element of virgin sacrifice, reminiscent of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975), lurking just below the surface of the straightforward plot and making the film far more nuanced than it seems.

LITTLE DARLINGS is a film is about the loss of innocence in every sense of the word. It examines the way we construct our knowledge of the world, and depicts the appeal and agony of experience. The shocking betrayals and incredible heartbreaks the girls inflict on each other awaken them to the cold fact that life rarely turns out like you thought it would be. At the same time, the film is refreshingly untainted by the crude, clinical vulgarity masquerading as realism which mars contemporary teen dramas like THIRTEEN (2003). Finally, here is a film which fully recognizes that the cerebral and emotional effects of sexual initiation outlast the physical ones. By the time the summer is over, no one is interested in the outcome of the contest. The girls learn that in the bittersweet game of growing up, there are often no winners. 4/5 stars.

ANGEL MEETS RANDY AS PENELOPE RAIDS THE BOYS' ROOM: