Towelhead

Last night an Israeli friend and I attended a screening of Towelhead, after which the director Allen Ball, creator of Six Feet Under, and his cast fielded questions from the audience. We found many of the film's awkward scenarios highly probable and applicable across cultures. Okay, some scenes made me flinch. The explicitness and ambiguity of teen sexual expression left me contemplating the dimensions of statutory rape and objectification of the female teen body. I was also put off by the one dimensional portrayal of the protagonist's Lebanese father. It was hard to move past the caricature.