Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger

Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger is the debut feature for Australian writer-director, Cathy Randall, who won a scholarship to a Los Angeles film school on the strength of an early draft of the film which, unsurprisingly, is loosely based on her own experience. Experienced she may be, funny, she is not and whilst her film is quite effective as the portrait of an awkward young girl crossing the threshold of adulthood, as a comedy it is less so.

One feels that Randall may well be familiar with the Wes Anderson 1998 comedy, Rushmore, about an eccentric Jewish lad at an Ivy League private school and used it as a reference point for her own film. Unfortunately Catanzariti is not the female analogue of Jason Schwartzman having little sense of comic timing, in fact little acting ability at all. As in a sense the whole film suffers from similar problems I assume that this is as much due to Randall’s inexperience as a director as Catanzariti’s as an actor. Too many of the film’s significant moments feel either poorly led up to or exited, or both. Proceedings never feel spontaneous or organically alive, there being too noticeable a gap between Randall’s script, which often feels contrived, and the performances including that of the very experienced Toni Collette. The result is a forced quality that only serves the film well at one time, when Esther and her rebel friends decide to give a young man his, and their, first blow job. Randall cuts from the embarrassed, nervous young girls to a delightful piece of fantasy cabaret which is just about worth the price of the ticket.

When Randall stops trying to amuse and shows us the emotional journey that Esther and Sunni are on, the film is actually quite effective. The way in which the girls try out different roles by copying their peers and parents as they search for their own identity is done well, Keisha Castle-Hughes in particular giving her character a strong sense of credibility and Catanzariti if not exactly strongly believable, winningly cute. And being cute, as the title indicates, is clearly one of the film’s goals. In this respect I’m not clear why from a technical point of view it is given such a polished wide-screen look. Although this sometimes delivers a nice effect, as with the opening choreographed scene of the uniformed girls on their school lawn, overall a smaller, more intimate scale would have suited the subject matter better and perhaps given it more life.

Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger probably would have benefited from a more experienced director but it is nevertheless a good-hearted genre film. Probably not one that is going to win a large theatrical audience but, I would imagine, an enjoyable enough outing or DVD for teen girls and their Mums (note the M rating but).

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