In “The Starling Girl,” actress Eliza Scanlen plays Jem Starling, a 17-year-old girl from a fundamental Christian church in Kentucky who pursues a relationship with a youth pastor a decade older.
It’s a story that might easily slip into lurid melodrama or sensationalism. But as Scanlen read writer-director Laurel Parmet’s screenplay, she realized the film had more sensitive, complicated things in mind.
“I thought it was a unique portrayal of relationships that have an age gap,” the 24-year-old Australian actress says on a recent video call. “It didn’t fall into a stereotype, which is very easy for that to occur. I think often people eroticize those relationships or they are reduced to simply the aggressor/victim of abuse dynamics.
“I also think Laurel illustrated Jem as someone who wielded agency whilst at the same time there was an abuse of power in the relationship. Both were truths in the story, which I found really fascinating,” says Scanlen.
This dynamic can leave viewers uncertain and uncomfortable at times, Parmet says on a separate video call. That’s a good thing, she says, because it allows viewers to think about the story without being told what to think.
“All the filmmaking choices were coming from this place of wanting it to feel immediate and wanting the audience to really be with Jem moment to moment,” Parmet says. “But at the same time not pushing an opinion onto the audience. Letting the audience come to their own conclusions.
“So, you know, not wanting to linger too much on things that were emotional or overwrought, or not telling the audience through music what to feel,” she says. “Just really letting the audience live with the characters and experience it organically.
“That sort of restraint I think was the real backbone of the filmmaking.”
Universal experiences
For Parmet, inspiration for “The Starling Girl” came out of her own complicated feelings about her own experience as a teen.
“It started for me from a personal place,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I had a relationship with an older man. I hesitate to call it a relationship even. It was what it was. And I, at the time, didn’t see myself as a victim. I felt like I had agency. Like I was mature enough.”
Many years later, she started to see it more clearly for what it really was.
“After it ended, I had a lot of negative feelings about it, and I’ve had a lot of guilt about it,” Parmet says. “But I don’t think I’d really even realized it. I kind of just put the truth to the side and didn’t want to think about it.”
Then while in Oklahoma doing research for a project on rodeos, she met and befriended a group of women from a patriarchal church there. While their lives and situations at first seemed entirely different than her own, Parmet says she came to see similarities in their stories and hers.
“At first, I was like, ‘Oh, this is kind of twisted,’” she says of the way in which the women she met were expected to subsume their own needs and desires to those of the men in their lives. “But the more I thought about it, the more I was struck by how we have a lot of similarities. Just in terms of growing up to have shame about our desires and the responsibility to not tempt men. That it was always the woman’s fault.
“It made me reflect back on my relationship in ways that I hadn’t before,” Parmet says. “It made me recognize this guilt that I had had, and made me question why I have this guilt despite the fact that he took advantage of me. Where does that come from? Where did I learn that?”
The commonality of experience inspired Parmet to write.
“I wanted to tell a story looking at the universal experiences for women,” she says. “Experiencing sexual shame and seeking approval in men no matter how you grew up.
“And in doing so, I honestly ended up finding so much empathy and admiration for faith that I was not expecting.”
Fiery and naive
Parmet was still writing “The Starling Girl” in 2018 when she saw Scanlen in the HBO limited series “Sharp Objects” and was struck by the then-teenaged actress’s performance as Amma, the younger half-sister of Amy Adams’ character Camille.
“I saw her and I was like, ‘Who is this?’” she says. “This is like exactly who I picture in my film. She’s able to straddle this lightness and darkness so well. She can be so sweet and young and naive looking. And then like on a dime, she’s this fiery, ferociousness boiling underneath. And I really needed that in this character.”
Years later, after the pandemic had slowed progress on the project, Parmet got the screenplay to Scanlen, who says she was as excited to play Jem as Parmet was to have her.
The fire within Jem that pushes her to pursue the decade-older youth pastor Owen (Lewis Pullman) is countered by the vulnerability of a sheltered teen girl, Scanlen says.
“I wanted to straddle both sides to her,” she says. “This naivety that makes her jump headfirst into situations without really – it’s not even that she’s not thinking of the consequences, it’s that she doesn’t understand the consequences because she’s very young. That’s what I was trying to achieve, I suppose.”
God and faith
Despite setting the story in a rural Kentucky church community, “The Starling Girl” treats the religious backgrounds of its characters with care and respect.
“The film doesn’t blaspheme God,” Parmet says. “It’s not about that. It’s looking at a more complex way to look at religion and to suggest that maybe there are multiple ways to connect with God.”
Jem is seen at the start of the film performing in church with a worship dance troupe. By the end, she’s dancing by herself in a mostly empty Memphis bar where her father had played gigs before giving up his band for church.
“It’s such a beautiful visual tool to mirror Jem’s awakening and search for self,” Scanlen says. “The dancing in the beginning of the film is a lot more restricted than the dancing we see at the end of the film. But she never loses the dancing, and to me that sort of represents her relationship with God, and how it evolves over the film.
“At the beginning of the film, her relationship with God is fraught, and it’s colored by this internal struggle with her own desires,” she says. “She’s constantly trying to suppress these desires and dancing is her greatest joy. Yet at the same time, she worries that her joy and love for dancing gets in the way of her relationship with God.
“As the film progresses, things fall apart,” Scanlen says. “She’s picking up the pieces throughout but God never leaves her and she’s forced to reckon with her faith. And she comes to an understanding that her relationship with God is changing, and her conception of God moving forward has to be different.”
“The Starling Girl” ends without spelling out what happens next in Jem’s life. Scanlen believes Jem will be OK in whatever comes after the credits roll.
“It really touched me that Laurel wrote it that she didn’t lose her faith,” Scanlen says. “Her faith became her own and she took control of it. It’s quite an empowering ending even though we don’t know exactly what happens.”
