SXSW FILM FESTIVAL 2023 REVIEW! Do you remember your adolescent years? For the majority of us, the teenage years are a time you want to forget. This is particularly true for filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo’s You Were My First Boyfriend, who, with co-director Sarah Enid Hagey, got HBO Documentary Films to fund a very special form of cinematic therapy as she confronts her past.
As an adult, Cecilia Aldarondo appears to have a successful career going as a successful documentarian and a successful personal life as a wife and mother. But deep within her soul, moments during her high school years still haunt her. After stumbling across her diary of long ago, she remembers her first crush, Joel, and a humiliating event that happened at school prom (think Carrie but without the terror and death), and Cecilia decides to use her documentary skills to face her pain.
As a way to exercise her “demons,” Cecilia uses her film school training to recreate that moment in time as a way to relive and release that moment from her life. Cecilia hires a cast of teenagers to play her friends and builds sets as best she can to bring that moment back to life. That’s well and good, but then Cecilia walks down a very cringey path, reaching out to her crush, reads him her diary entries, and then gets him to recreate a scene from My So-Called Life where she plays Angela Chase, and Joel is Jordan Catalano. Yes…it’s all cringe, yet a wonder to behold.
Now that Cecilia is on a roll, she decides to address other aspects of her teen years and recreate those moments, including the friendship with her kindred spirit, Caroline, and the inevitable distance created when Cecilia sought after cooler friends. There’s also a time when Cecilia stood back on a camping trip as the mean girls pulled a prank on another high school outcast. Lastly, there’s the competition and inadequacy she felt with her “more attractive” sister prompting them to recreate Tori Amos’ music video, Crucify.
“…got HBO Documentary Films to fund a very special form of cinematic therapy as she confronts her past.”
I’m not exactly the demographic for this film. Never in my life was I ever a Jewish teen girl from the East coast, but I was definitely an awkward oddball teen trying to make friends and figure life out. Being awkward during our teens is a universal feeling that no one escapes, whether it’s pining for a crush, being ridiculed or set up for an awful prank…even refusing to stand up for a fellow classmate who was bullied. All this provides plenty of common ground for anyone and everyone to connect with Cecilia’s story.
In the end, I found myself both fascinated and transfixed by what Cecilia Aldarondo was able to accomplish through the medium of film. As one of her teen actors calls it…elaborate therapy. Elaborate therapy is exactly what You Were My First Boyfriend is. As Cecilia recreates all these moments in her life, she becomes reflective about her memories of that moment and her feelings. Her sister, friends, and the actual people from that time then act as a sounding board giving crucial insight and perspective from their point of view.
What stands out in the film the most are these cinematic recreations of Cecilia’s life. Cecilia plays herself in every scene, and everyone recognizes the “ridiculousness” of watching a middle-aged woman playing herself as a teen while standing next to actual teens playing her friends. This is a running theme of the documentary, and it never gets tired or feels repetitive. Strangely enough, this would be a perfect film for teens to watch and reflect upon.
I had fun with You Were My First Boyfriend, but it’s important to approach the film with the right perspective. Yes, serious topics are covered, from feeling “less than” to bullying to the harsh subject of suicide. It’s silly and insightful, and that’s the way it’s meant to be. Lighten up and learn something.
You Were My First Boyfriend premiered at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival.
