This ‘coming-of-age’ film tells the story of a 14-year-old girl, Maeve Brennan and her journey through adolescences from her first bra to her first heartbreak.  Written and directed by Marian Quinn and shot in Dublin, this film has all the realities that most 14-year-old girls deal with in 1979.  Maeve and her three best friends are experiencing the ‘in-between’ stage of no longer being a child and yet, not quite a woman.  These four friends are totally inseparable, facing the world together as young women, yet Quinn gives each of the girls their own unique personalities with each facing their own set of family problems.  The film opens up with Maeve trying out her fist bra, which her friends express their approval.   The one exception is that this transformation into womanhood is not shared by her feminist friend Claire, who refuses to wear a bra.   Regardless, her friends inform Maeve that this new bra is her gateway into maturity and her entrance in to the world of dating. 

The Coming-of-age genre has its origins in the German Bildungsroman, a literary category that chronicles a young man’s development into maturity.  The main character of a Bildungsroman searches for answers and hopes to gain knowledge and wisdom, but this knowledge comes with conflict and disappointment.   Although the Bildungsroman was based on a male perspective, Quinn’s female version of Bildungsroman leads us into the lives of four coming-of-age friends and their journey for enlightenment.   Maeve goes through a personal transformation when she starts dating an older boy and ends up alienating her friends to spend time with him.  After her first kiss and first slow dance, he dumps Maeve when he is attracted to an older girl.   In a Bildungsroman, the objective at the end is maturity, in which the main character accepts their mistakes and moves on.  Maeve realizes that she let her friends down and that having a boyfriend was not the most important issue in her life.  In the end, Maeve is a little bit more mature and wiser. She reunites with her friends and Claire finally gets herself a bra.

I would recommend this film to my female friends; I am not so sure a male audience would enjoy it quite so much. At times it is a bit hard to understand the words due to the Irish accents.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Source:  McWilliams, Ellen.  "The Coming of Age of the Female Bildungsroman."  Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman.  Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 1-12.

Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dysIJlVXE0g