An Adolescent (2001)

Creepy, Disgusting People Do Creepy, Disgusting Things

A middle aged cop continually has sex with a 15 year old girl as they, um, "fall in love." We're supposed to accept that this is ok, and that it truly is "love" because the 15 yr old girl is weird as fuck and spouts gibberish about Chinese proverbs related to the Chinese symbol tattooed on the cop's back. But the film does nothing to denote any kind of love between the two, and the constant tattoo gibberish simply comes off as an excuse to show an old man diddling a little girl.

Others in the town know about the affair and a cop at the precinct simply jokes to the main character cop, "So you've moved on from married women to school girls, huh?" The 15 yr old girl's grandfather (and her caretaker), not only approves of the relationship, but gives his blessing and asks the cop to take good care of his granddaughter after he dies. In other words, the affair is played as ok within the social context of the characters' world as another way of making the viewer accept it. Note to the director: it did not work. Because the viewer still does not accept it. Indeed, the viewer is still repulsed by this affair.

All of the characters are unrealistically weird, and have backstories of parents who are either suicidal or sexually abusive. The 15 year old girl's brother is mentally disabled and her grandfather is an undertaker. Her job is to put makeup on corpses, and we see her doing this a number of times. The movie is packed with such scenes that are designed to be meaningful but are, instead, simply disturbing. This makes it worse than pretentious, because even the pretentiousness falls flat. Ultimately, it's just a movie where creepy, disgusting people do creepy disgusting things.

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