I loved this film. I felt my hearts drowning in the most comforting manner at half two in the morning (on a Tuesday). I got so emotional when I heard the Alex Turner's soundtrack, because they've been on loop in those insomniac high-school days (and probably again in my 2nd year of uni - damn, that sounds so archaic already).

I would have given it a five star if these two teenagers actually manage to resolve their issues and follow their instincts about love in the span of this one and half hour, somehow. (I am too idealistic, I know) But they end up hurting each other so much, resulting in open-ended narrative like The 400 Blows (the lone hero at sea, the envisioned film scene, etc.) But I guess that's the charm of being edgy teens; and that's the reason why it'd still matter when they reach 38. It always cut somewhat too deep and leave people stranded, unresolved, without a closure; they’d make people hurt, slightly, for the rest of their life.

Hearing every Turner song appearing one by one in the film was like replaying my melancholic days on repeat. It’s sunny outside as it usually is, but I'm constantly raining. Rain water dripping down from my eyelashes, seeping through my veins and bones; nostalgia gathers up like mist; it froths and floods like the sea where Oliver stood and starred at the horizon. It shrouds me and leave me undone. My hearts sink like a sunset; my hearts glimmer in the tranquility of dawn; my hearts catch the light of the moon; and then, my hearts foster a pouring rain.

(Wow. What is wrong with me.)

The atmosphere of the film is so quaint; it's exquisitely off-beat and art film-y. It is very British as well, of course - seeing those particular-shaped bus stops along the pavement, ones that only belong to remote English towns; those steampunk-ish, abandoned places in the outskirts and the gloomy sea that's always icy-cold and furious, I feel somehow validated. It was as if I lived in a place like that for all my life.

If I were a teenager growing up in a place like that, or in a place like where I am now, I'd definitely be like them. I can envision myself wearing that oversized school uniform, walking up that damp gravel road. I'd sit in that unremarkable classroom with my head turned towards the window, in some daydreams and fantasies that I'd entertain anyway, with or without surveillance.

I, too, often imagine my own funeral when I was younger; truth to be told, I still entertain the notion of me dying until today, but it is not about other people's reaction anymore. I'd imagine myself do it and come up with ways of dealing with all the stuff I leave behind...I haven't found the perfect plan of disposing them so far, if you have to know.

The truth is, I know that I'd be bullied anyway; I know I'd be traumatised anywhere, and I'd grow up skewed and weird anyhow. I just hoped that I'm another form of weird instead of this form. Sigh, but everyone knows that's impossible.

Somehow I'm making this film all about me, and I probably should move on.

Onto the characters - Oliver's probably an unsympathetic self-centred freak and Jordana's too aggressive; they seriously need to learn how to communicate to make this work (along with more heartbreaks, I suppose). But this sharpness and uneasiness is something that only a 15-ish teenager would do. Being seriously heartbroken for weeks; creeping upon their own parents; burning things for no reason...this edginess and intensity is something I truly miss about myself (but wish I never have to relive again in my 20s), though I'd mostly only entertained these thoughts instead of enforcing them. Therefore, seeing them on screen doing things that I absolutely wanted to do but never could have given me that bittersweet realisation that I was never young.

Speaking of feeling "young", it is weird to me that I'm still feeling like a high-schooler when I should be graduating from uni this summer, as if my high-school years didn't register at all. Rationally, I know that I've spend three years in a high school that resembles nothing of these films; emotionally, I feel that stuck in a comfortable place for too long would just...foster my imagination too much. Am I just mentally/emotionally making up the lost time/life that I should have lived, when there's time? I don't know, but this quarantine life has turned me into those girls in American teen movies, somehow. It somehow prevented me fulfilling any my responsibilities at hand. It has been for some weeks, and f**k, it is difficult.

Those teen movie heroines would get home from school, changing into pyjamas, flopping onto their double beds with exquisite patterned bed covers, pretending to do something that looks like homework (very shortly) before all the texting, gossiping and other non-academic escapade begin. And, of course, I wouldn't join their silly in-group activities (being such an outsider as always). I would watch sad movies until three and write long passages about them. I'd wallow, starring at something for ages, scrolling on social media endlessly until my eyes hurt.

Except there's no school anymore for me to go to. I wake up, and I start to live like a teen movie heroine with minimum work done. I think I'm slowly suffocating.

And, lastly, I don't think the film is a comedy. It's too quirky, too artsy, too alternative, and too deviated to be one. Maybe also because it hit too close to home. If my passage of "imagining oneself as a high-schooler when that person's actually nearly 22" didn't already prove my point.

If you’ve read this far - sorry. I hope you haven’t.