dir. David Gordon Green

Opens Fri April 4 at

various theaters.

Although most Hollywood films portray it otherwise, falling in love with someone isn't all hot sex on countertops--that stuff hopefully comes later. There's a lot of fumbling and awkwardness involved in introducing a stranger to the most vulnerable parts of yourself. Honesty about who you are, what you want, and what you have to give are valuable commodities in a relationship, and rarely do audiences get to see the difficulties in divulging this information as they do with All the Real Girls.

A small film with a mostly unknown cast, Girls centers on a rural North Carolinian town, where the pace moves as slowly as the seasons. Paul (Paul Schneider) and Noel (Zooey Deschanel) have their first kiss in the film's opening, a meeting negotiated with considerable sexual tension until the reward of giving in breaks the ice. From there, the depths of the two lovers unfold at a pace so sleepy you almost feel like you're witnessing it in real time. With a delicate knack for character building, it's revealed that Paul is the town womanizer who can't keep his dick in his pants long enough to save his reputation for the next girl, while Noel is his polar opposite, having lived relatively sheltered in an all-girls boarding school for most of her adolescent life. The little suspense this film is able to build comes from wondering when the slow bridge of trust between the two young lovers is going to break--which it inevitably does with painful results.

Anyone who's ever gone through thinking a relationship was the real thing, only to see it combust in a matter of hours, will feel the sling of the arrows of pain and regret captured realistically in this film, and for that reason, Girls has the ability to resonate long after the film ends. The problem, though, is that once the movie reaches its inevitable conflict, it just sort of stumbles through the motions to an ending, Noel flattened to a one-dimensional version of her former character and Paul carrying the rest of the flaccid storyline on his back. In a film that already moves at a snail's pace, losing an audience's drive to care about the characters is a dangerous thing, and unfortunately, after spending so much time trusting that sticking with this couple would lead to a more committed storyline, All the Real Girls' audience ends up cheated.