“Well, except for the garbage and the cars, it’s like following Heathcliff out on the moors!”

This movie makes a good companion to Thirteen. Two teenage friends rebel a bit, fall out a bit, and generally act their age.. But where Thirteen was gritty, real, and shocking, played mostly like a documentary saying “this is our youth…”, Confessions is that time of life seen as a young person sees it, basically a rollercoaster of fun and perceived tragedy, none of which really matters in the end.

Lindsay Lohan has surprisingly little to do in the lead, playing as she does an aspiring young actress/ mini version of Edina Monsoon from Absolutely Fabulous. It’s Alison Pill, who played April’s sister in Pieces of April, who gets to do the real acting around here, and she really does steal the movie from Lohan. Carol Kane is wonderful as the teacher, especially if you’ve really known teachers like this – sweet, nervous, but capable of completely cracking under the strain and being scary enough to give you nightmares. She has the most fantastic line in the movie, when, in the final scene as her school production, a rock version of “Pygmalion” set in modern day NYC, “Eliza Rocks!” opens, she stands at the piano and says to the children assembled as the “band” and says, “Press your bars, children…” as we realise all the children are sat not in front of tubas, flutes and violins as is usual in school play scenes, but in front of laptops… brill moment.

The fantasy aspects of the movie didn’t quite work for me – the movie opens with Lohan’s character day dreaming about being left alone in NYC, she gets dropped off in front of a hotel and does a Gene Kelly-ish run up a tree before the camera pulls back to show a doll-house set. There’s a lot of stuff like this, flashbacks and exaggerated stories with fireworks writing words in the sky and cardboard flowers appearing in the windows in the background. It’s a really great idea, but I don’t know if something was either missing or just, there was too much… it’s all extremely over-the-top, which I guess is in keeping with the title, but these sequences never worked as well as, say, the dreamy sequences in Ma Vie en Rose.

Lindsay Lohan sings a fair bit in the movie which I really loved after hearing her voice in Freaky Friday. It’d be great to see her do a fully-fledged serious movie musical, I still think she’s capable of anything a script can throw at her, one of the best young actresses around, which makes it even more amazing that Alison Pill stands out so much in this movie.