Towelhead

Review

Alan Ball’s Towelhead is a faithful adaptation of Alicia Erian’s snappy novel about a 13-year-old mixed-race girl, Jasira (Summer Bishil), who finds herself caught between many rocks and even more hard places. Men have started sniffing her up, projecting things on her. Her mother’s boyfriend volunteers to shave her pubic hair�which results in her being shipped off to live in the Houston suburbs with her Lebanese dad (Peter Macdissi), who promptly slaps her when she shows up at the breakfast table in a revealing outfit, refuses to let her use tampons (only pads), then carries on in front of her with his girlfriend. This fellow is a mass of contradictory impulses�forbidding her to date an African-American classmate, Thomas (Eugene Jones), while decrying prejudice against Middle Easterners; loathing Saddam while resenting Bush Sr. (The film is set during the first Gulf War.) Jasira herself is torn in about ten different directions. Thomas turns out to be another fervent pubic-hair shaver. A grown-up neighbor (Aaron Eckhart) shares his porn magazines and she � likes them. Does she like him? When Jasira loses control of her sexuality, it’s with an irreducible mixture of erotic pleasure and victimization.

This is potentially incendiary material for the screen, but Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under) cools it down and keeps it at a slight ironic distance, often presenting Jasira as a ripe sexual object. The film is superbly acted (especially by Macdissi, who makes the father a borderline hysteric), but it’s hard to know what to feel except, �How can any girl navigate this oversexualized culture?� — David Edelstein