After watching it in its entirety, I found the film to be much deeper than I had expected, and one that made me think a lot about its central theme: woman’s beauty as a double-edged sword.
The film’s style is expressive and intentionally exaggerated, yet it manages to maintain a consistent tone throughout.
The most common criticism of the film is that it criticizes the male gaze while simultaneously being full of it.
I don’t disagree with this criticism. Had the director been a woman, we might have seen something different, perhaps even something more mature.
However, since the entire film is presented through the point of view of an adolescent discovering sexual attraction for the first time, the male gaze serves a purpose in the story, to some extent.
Beyond that, the film strongly criticizes reducing beautiful women to nothing more than an object of pleasure or gossip, and forgetting that, first and foremost, she is a human being.