Review

What: Picture Day

When: Tonight, 7 p.m.

Where: Vic Theatre

Rating: two and a half stars

Not a whole lot happens in writer-director Kate Melville’s promising, rough-edged feature debut, but it doesn’t matter much. The main reason to see this engaging but superficial portrait of adolescence is Tatiana Maslany as Claire, a rebellious, trash-talking Toronto teenager with a nickname that translates to school slut. As Claire oscillates between relationships with Jim (Steve McCarthy), a thirtysomething rock musician, and smitten Henry (Spencer Van Wyck), her nerdy best-friend she used to babysit, Maslany imbues her promiscuous protagonist with more depth than the material provides. It’s a measure of Maslany’s extraordinary powers of conviction that she even survives a scene in which, apparently as a pre-emptive strike against further ridicule, she details one of her particularly shocking sexcapades to stunned onlookers. Her mesmerizng performance almost compensates for Melville’s excessive fondness for musical interludes and the film’s most contrived sequences, chiefly those that establish the wacky square-ness of Henry’s over-protective parents. If you miss Maslany’s terrific performance in this quasi-feminist coming-of-age flick, don’t worry. You’ll be seeing plenty more of her.

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