- The ten episodes of the first season of Pen15 are available in full since this Friday on MyCanal.
- Its creators, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, thirty, play two schoolgirls, in the middle of a cast of teenagers.
- Like Freaks and Geeks , Pen15 has a deep and immediate understanding of how adolescents absorb and perpetuate trauma.
Back to the ungrateful age! From Sex Education to Euphoria via Derry Girls , teen shows are flourishing on all streaming platforms. In this fertile landscape, Pen15 , a 10-episode series available in full on myCanal this Friday, could be just another comedy about the throes of puberty. How does this series stand out in the big teenage series?
One is a large jig with disproportionate braces, the other, an improbable bowl cut. Anna and Maya, 13 and inseparable, are preparing to enter 5th against the background of Britney Spears in the early 2000s. Back to school, complicated relationships with parents or even the first kiss, Pen15 tackles the recurring themes of teen shows. .. but in a very special way.
13-year-old heroines camped out by 30-something
Its creators, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, thirty, embody the two schoolgirls, in the middle of a cast of teenagers. This shift gives flesh to the discomfort and strangeness of the adolescent body. Beyond the gadget, this shift becomes relevant for characters who feel rejected.
The concept guarantees by contrast a comic or disturbing effect when a scene invites Anna Konkle to flirt with her young costar Brady Allen. The editing then judiciously gives way to a pair of disembodied tongues where the male oral organ clearly belongs to an adult face.
The two creators stage their memories, alternately tender and traumatic from the age of the first emotions. This device brings together the very essence of the teen show, namely the work of adults who look back on their adolescence with distance and the benefit of experience.
Deep under the varnish of the comedy potache
Like Big Mouth on Netflix, Pen15 claims the use of borderline gravelly humor, hitherto reserved for guys, comedies like American Pie . The series pirates the codes of masculinity to better reclaim them.
The series talks about everything that a teenage girl is not supposed to talk about, such as masturbation or periods. Under the potache varnish of the title Pen15 (a joke from American schoolyards, referring to the word "penis"), the series portrays with acuity and sensitivity what girls feel during their adolescence. It is in many ways an ongoing process of loss. Pen15 knows that behind the question of sex, it is a question of growing up and giving up childhood.
If this cathartic comedy makes people laugh a lot, it never makes fun. Maya and Anna are, as Britney Spears puts it, not girls and not women yet. When they play with their Sylvanian Families dolls, their awakening hormones make tiny creatures play scorching scenes. ("I can't do this anymore. I have a wife and children at home!")
Whether it's practicing kissing, drinking your first beer or facing the racism of your girlfriends, Pen15 reveals intense personal experiences. Like Freaks and Geeks , Pen15 has a deep and immediate understanding of how adolescents absorb and perpetuate trauma.
Pen15 also takes place in the year 2000 - the year in which the legendary series by Paul Feig and Judd Apatow was broadcast - and focuses on details from the beginning of the century such as instant messaging AOL Instant Messenger and the unforgettable “Wazzup? Or the grimaces of Ace Ventura while reflecting current concerns.
A creative staging
Pen15 is teeming with astonishing discoveries in terms of staging. When Maya and Anna find themselves one evening in a garage where a group of girls take advantage of the parents' absence to drink beers and get high on the dusting machine for computers, the two friends, uncomfortable, scrutinize themselves. "We leave from here", appears in subtitle. We still think of Maya seeing her first tampon ten times larger than it really is, or of a mirror makeup session performed from the point of view of the mirror.
Rarely, we have thus described female masturbation with this shot on the vulva (covered) but literally thrilling of Maya. Art of the diversion of the male codes: one never saw a girl wiping her secretions on the carpet. Pen 15 shows the struggle of a young girl, completely alone, facing the overflowing body emergency.
It will then be female shame, outsourced in the form of her late grandfather (“ojichan” in Japanese) as the ghost smiles when she sees Maya's brother, Shuji, downloading porn from AOL. Shame will haunt Maya's sexuality in a way that will never haunt that of her brother. Yes, Pen15 is at the same time the very funny diary of two teenage girls but also an uncomfortable time machine.
- Series
- Canal Plus
- Adolescence