If you find yourself thinking of a certain teen horror film during the opening of You Were My First Boyfriend, you’ll be rewarded with a brief but explicit visual reference to Carrie about 45 minutes later. Writer-director Cecilia Aldarondo’s adolescent years weren’t quite so blood-drenched, but this essay on her own pubescent angst channels the melodramatic mood we all encountered in our teen years. What’s most interesting about You Were My First Boyfriend—in which the adult Aldarondo recreates episodes from her childhood, with amusing and often touching results—is the universality of the feelings it excavates. I’ve never been an overweight Catholic Puerto Rican girl in middle-class white Florida, but I fully grok what Aldarondo means when she recalls the ambivalent satisfaction of hanging with the cool kids, in this case during her one secret visit to Spring Break, while feeling like a dissociated bit-player in their movie. While often very insightful, the film sometimes edges towards indulgence and self-pity, but then, again, we’re all guilty of that, and it’s cleverly built to finally acknowledge Aldarondo’s own moments of moral cowardice or outright cruelty, and the price of self-obsession. Less heavily, this film is especially for those of you who grew up in the ‘90s wanting to be either Tori Amos or Jordan Catalano’s girlfriend.

Stir, May 2023