"Miller's Girl",  Jade Halley Bartlett's idiosyncratic film about an 18-year-old girl who outshines her creative writing teacher, and not just in literary terms, is really not as bad as the American film critics would have you believe. You really have to wonder whether all these critics have even read any of the books that play such an important role in this movie.

Miller's Girl

USA 2024 | 94 minutes

Of course, the film can be criticized for its repeatedly esoteric erotic sentences and a strange dramaturgical break halfway through the film, but on the other hand, Bartlett's script and her production contains plenty to continually surprise and amaze . Perhaps we should also bear in mind that we are dealing here with something of a counter-project to Alexander Payne's Holdovers, a film in which, again, a failed college professor becomes rather closer to his student than is usually the case. And of course, we're also a long, long way from utopia films about teachers, such as Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989).

No, you just have to put these formats out of your mind, or enjoy the friction, because Miller's Girls is more comparable to films of the relatively recent genre of young adult films and their literary equivalent, all of which are somewhat reminiscent of photo love stories, but with unexpected quality and depth - take the Tribute to Panem prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023) or the horror of Halina Reijn's Bodies Bodies Bodies, which sends a group of teenage TikTokers, in a state of hysteria, on a horror trip.

Jade Halley Bartlett's version has a lot in common with these films and yet much that is new. It's not just the lead actress Jenna Ortega, who here as Cairo Sweet (nomen est omen) plays up her broodingly sweet poutiness and amoral superiority in the same way she did in the Netflix series and Addams Family adaptation Wednesday.

No, Martin Freeman is also on top form,  playing opposite her as the failed writer and creative writing teacher Jonathan Miller. He not only finds himself in a literary duel with his much younger pupil, but also has to contend with an increasingly dramatic Lolita complex, as books become no longer enough for Cairo Sweet. 

Vladimir Nabokov | Lolita

So at some point the film moves almost experimentally from Vladimir Nabokov and his Lolita to Henry Miller and Jonathan Miller (another nomen est omen) and, with the help of a few quirky supporting roles - Jonathan's successful wife Beatrice, with her penchant for alcohol, his colleague Boris and Cairo's friend Winnie - takes on a faltering rhythm, paved with unusual insights. These range from the understanding that flowers grow even in cemeteries, to the life lesson that souls can recognise each other, to the dangers of literature and, as in the works of Fontane, storms that hint at what everyone already secretly suspects.

Henry Miller | Tropic of Cancer

This may sound a little ironic and perhaps has the taste of petrol station sushi, but Bartlett's dialogues, like her literary escapades, are just as much fun as the frolicking actors, who in the end almost find themselves in a Chekhovian war of generations and life cultures. Of course, this is not Russia, but the Tennessee of the southern states, as sultry here as Chekhov's old Russia. And all knowledge is as futile as death.