The First Time (2012)

There is a particular kind of film that arrives with no agenda whatsoever, and in 2012 Jon Kasdan made one of them. The First Time concerns Dave, a high school senior consumed by unrequited longing for his best friend, and Aubrey, a junior at a different school with a boyfriend who fails to appreciate her. They meet outside a house party. Over a single weekend they talk, drink wine, fumble toward each other, have an unsatisfying first sexual encounter, retreat, and reunite. The film runs eighty-five minutes and asks nothing of the audience beyond a tolerance for shy adolescents discovering attraction. It is almost defiantly small.

For those of us who catalog the cultural temperature of every release, this one reads as nearly blank. The cast is white to a degree that suggests a casting call held in a single Connecticut zip code, with Lamarcus Tinker appearing as the friend known only as Big Corporation, a presence so incidental it registers as set dressing. Aubrey is granted some spine, a no-PDA rule and the willingness to disagree with Dave about the significance of first times, though the film has no argument to make about gender and no interest in making one. Race goes unmentioned. Class goes unmentioned. The climate, capitalism, and the body as a political site all go unmentioned. The movie is a romance, and it stays a romance.

What it does offer is restraint, and restraint is not the same as a message. The film refuses to leer at its teenagers, declines to punish them for wanting each other, and avoids the sermonizing that this genre so often mistakes for depth. A critic from the New York Times praised it for dodging the usual temptations, which is a polite way of saying the film has no convictions to impose. It grossed twenty-two thousand dollars domestically. Nobody was lectured. Nobody was changed. The classification proceeds accordingly, and the ledger stays largely empty.