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This programme contains some strong language

Remember when we were young?

I'm in the prime of my youth and I'll only be young once.

Yeah, but you're going to be stupid for the rest of your life.

That summer.

That one last dance.

That one last day of childhood before we had to grow up.

How do you capture that moment forever?

Take a boy or a girl,

on a journey to find out who they are.

They fight with their parents...

are inspired by a teacher...

and make friends they'll remember forever.

First love...

first fight...

and first steps into a new and uncertain world.

All played out to the soundtrack of your life.

In this series, I'm looking at some of cinema's most enduring genres,

from the romcom to the horror film.

I'm exploring the conventions

which underwrite the movies we love the most,

and examining the technique film-makers use

to keep us coming back for more.

And tonight I'll show you what makes the perfect coming-of-age movie.

Of all the genres in this series, coming-of-age movies

are, perhaps, the most personal.

Personal for the film-makers who may be putting their own life

stories up on screen,

and personal for us because so often those stories

reflect our own experiences.

These films deal with characters on the cusp of something,

struggling through that netherworld between childhood and adulthood.

And the best of them capture the authentic feeling of growing up

and that has universal appeal.

Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?

What've you got?

Coming-of-age films cross borders, from Miami to Cumbernauld...

..Tehran...

to Brighton.

And the real magic of these movies is that they can make us share the

experience of characters with whom, on the surface,

we have very little in common.

What's up, Daddy? What the hell is that?

A dress. Says who? Calvin Klein.

For example, one of my own favourite coming-of-age movies

is an obscure, American B picture, from the 1970s, called Jeremy.

The film is an oddity, a cheap indie pic shot on 16mm.

It stars a young Robby Benson,

now best known as the voice of Beast in Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

Benson plays Jeremy,

a music student in New York

who falls in love with a dancer played by Glynis O'Connor.

But their romance proves all too fleeting,

as her parents decide to move away from New York,

tearing the young lovers apart.

I first saw Jeremy as the supporting feature

to the Charles Bronson western Breakheart Pass.

I was about 12 years old, never had a girlfriend,

never been to New York,

and had no expectation of ever going to a music academy.

But it didn't matter.

The film struck a chord.

It touched my soul and it broke my heart

and it's stayed with me ever since.

Oh!

Oh, you scared me.

Oh, gee, I'm sorry.

I was equally struck by John Singleton's

'90s breakthrough picture, Boyz N The Hood.

A story of young African Americans facing up to a crisis of fatherhood

in a world stricken with poverty, crime and guns,

despite the fact that I grew up in Finchley

and have no experience of life in any hood.

Is that blood? What happened?

What do you think? Somebody got smoked.

Look at the hole in the wall, stupid.

At least I can tell my times tables.

Boyz N The Hood uses the classic elements of the coming-of-age genre.

A distinctive time and setting.

A young hero trying to find his place in the world.

A father figure.

A first crush.

A gang of buddies.

Moments of fun and the music to go along with it.

And a loss of innocence,

a crisis, that forces the characters to grow up.

The point is that whatever the specifics of culture or gender,

the best coming-of-age movies take a universal truth we all understand

and then repackage it with different music, fashions and slang,

or different racial, sexual and social tensions.

Whether they're post-war European auteurs...

Bonjour, madame.

..or the most recent awards winners,

film-makers have a particular fascination with these stories.

They can make movies about what they know best,

perhaps even recapture their own youth,

and reflect on some of the most profound questions of all our lives.

The protagonists of coming-of-age movies range across sex, sexuality,

class, ethnicity, nationality.

But they're all on a quest for identity.

If I had one day...

..when...

When I didn't have to be all confused...

and didn't have to feel that I was ashamed of everything.

If I felt that I belonged someplace, you know...

OK, Christine. Lady Bird.

Is that your given name?

Yeah. Why is it in quote?

Well, I gave it to myself.

It's given to me by me.

OK. Take it away, Lady Bird.

Even Harry Potter,

a coming-of-age hero for kids growing up in the 21st-century,

spends eight films working out if he fits the label

he'd been given as an 11-year-old.

You're a wizard, Harry.

I'm a what?

A wizard, and a thumping good 'un, I'd wager.

Once you're trained up a little. No, you've made a mistake.

I mean,

I can't be a wizard.

I mean, I'm just...Harry.

Just Harry.

Sometimes, a film will be explicitly built

around a character's search for identity.

Take The Breakfast Club,

which cemented writer-director John Hughes' reputation

as the auteur of the '80s teen movie.

Although Hughes' hit has recently been the subject of some

uncomfortable reassessment regarding its gender politics,

it was seen at the time as the quintessential coming-of-age movie,

in which a group of high schoolers spending a Saturday in detention are

forced to question who they are.

All right, people,

we're going to try something a little different today.

We are going to write an essay...

of no less than 1,000 words...

describing to me who you think you are. This a test?

Think about the voice-over that bookends The Breakfast Club.

It may be cheesy, but it sets out its stall.

Here are a group of teenagers being labelled by adults,

when they don't even know how they'd label themselves yet.

And you see us as you want to see us.

In the simplest terms, and most convenient definitions.

You see us as a brain,

an athlete,

a basket case.

For all its era specific pop culture trappings, the music,

the clothes, the attitudes,

The Breakfast Club is cut from timeless coming-of-age cloth,

telling a story about its young misfits' search for identity.

This is a key theme of coming-of-age films,

the idea that who you are is up for grabs,

and if you don't decide for yourself,

others will try to decide for you.

We can see it in movies, from the 1955 classic, Rebel Without A Cause,

to the 2017 Oscar winner, Moonlight.

On one level, Moonlight could be described as a film about poverty,

drug dealing and hard scrabble lives in the toughest areas of Florida.

Hi, Mom. You cannot be here tonight.

I got company coming.

Find somewhere for you to be.

Yet, thanks to the brilliance of co-writer Tarell Alvin McCraney and

director Barry Jenkins,

both of whom draw on their own personal experiences,

Moonlight becomes something quite different.

A beautiful and universal tale of finding one's own identity.

This central theme is spelt out to the young hero by a father figure,

drug dealer Juan.

At some point you gotta decide for yourself who you going to be.

Can't let nobody make that decision for you.

A kaleidoscopic gem,

Moonlight uses three different actors to focus

upon three distinct periods of its subject's life.

Barry Jenkins makes clear that this is a film about finding who you are

by titling each act with the three different names and identities

the protagonist assumes,

Little, Chiron and Black.

Lending heartfelt voice to characters

who've previously been silenced or sidelined,

it's an astonishingly accomplished work,

a coming-of-age movie which returns time and time again

to the same, repeated question.

It's a question we first hear when Chiron's a frightened child,

worried about his life and sexuality.

And just as that letter to Mr Vernon bookends The Breakfast Club,

so that question returns in the final act of Moonlight,

when the now grown Chiron is reunited

with the man he fell in love with as a boy.

Who is you, man?

Who, me? Yeah, nigger, you.

Saying, man, them fronts. That car.

Who is you, Chiron?

I'm me, man. Ain't tryin' be nothing else.

The search for identity is made explicit in Moonlight

with the script giving clear voice

to its characters' uncertainties and questions.

But sometimes those questions don't have to be spoken.

They can be raised through visual motifs which tell the audience

all they need to know about a character's search for themselves.

It's no surprise that so many young protagonists

are seen running or cycling...

..or hitting the road for a journey of self-discovery.

Sometimes, those characters find themselves driving round in circles.

Sometimes they're just trying to negotiate the emotional traffic.

That's the way! Relax position.

Brake. That's the way.

Come here, you. Was that the emergency stop?

Emergency stop unsimulated, yes.

Hi, Mike. Call me Dad, Gregory, or Pop or something.

It makes me feel better when you call me Dad or Father.

Or perhaps they're just utterly becalmed, like Dustin Hoffman,

iconically floating on a lilo in The Graduate.

I would say that I'm just drifting here, in the pool. Why?

Well, it's very comfortable just to drift here.

But whether the hero is drifting or trying to escape,

it's essential that we establish the world of their story.

From the streets of Barnsley in Ken Loach's Kes,

to Tehran in Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis,

the settings of truly great coming-of-age movies

make the unfamiliar seem familiar.

Iron Maiden.

Hey, how much do you want for it?

90 tomans. 50.

60. 50.

60. 50. 50.

Whether it's a high school hallway, a small town street...

Hey, see you, Janice.

..or a family dinner table,

the best of these films make us feel that this is where we live,

at least for the duration of the movie.

What are you doing?

Hey, this shirt. Watch the shirt, stupid. Basta!

All right, come on.

But you can't detach where these stories take place

from when they take place.

Coming-of-age movies are by their nature set in the past.

If not the literal past,

then in the past of the film-maker's experience

because teenagers themselves

don't usually get to make movies.

So, even if the target audience is teens,

in general, these films are made by adults looking back at their past,

often with a hefty dose of nostalgia.

Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, made in 1959,

has become one of the most influential films of the genre.

The title refers to a French idiom for raising hell,

and it's the story of a misunderstood adolescent.

This semiautobiographical coming-of-age classic

was Truffaut's first film.

He wanted to depict adolescence not with nostalgia,

but as the painful experience it really is.

Look at the opening sequence,

shot from a car driving through the streets of Paris,

it depicts the Eiffel Tower as being always just out of reach,

hidden behind buildings.

Then, as Truffaut's screen credit appears,

there's a moment when our goal is attainable.

And then it's gone,

receding in the rear-view mirror.

Truffaut is battling a conundrum with which

the makers of coming-of-age films have always wrestled.

The tension between authenticity and nostalgia.

You can see it again in the iconic shot which ends the film.

Our lead is looking straight to camera, challenging and real,

then the freeze-frame, a child frozen in time,

becoming a nostalgic image.

Childhood turns into a photograph, something to look back upon.

When making her Oscar-nominated coming-of-age movie Lady Bird,

Greta Gerwig said that she wanted to offer a female counterpart

to films like The 400 Blows,

acknowledging the influence of Truffaut

alongside other genre milestones

like George Lucas' American Graffiti.

SHE SCREAMS

Larry, how long will this hold us? I don't know.

Lady Bird is a female-centred film made by a woman at a time

when Hollywood finally seems to be waking up to feminism.

It feels very much of the moment.

But in the same way that American Graffiti asked

"where were you in '62"?

Lady Bird asks "where were you in 2002"?

The protagonists of American Graffiti and Lady Bird

are of different sexes

and come from different decades,

but both are eager to leave the West Coast small towns where they grew up

and head east to become writers.

And both films are loosely based

on the teenage years of their directors,

and are set when Lucas and Gerwig were 18.

What did you say? Wait, what did you say?

Can I get your number? We were looking to set up

some more gigs down there. Definitely.

It's my parents' number.

You don't have a cellphone?

No. Good girl.

Gerwig has said that she was interested in how personal life

and history intertwined because often in films, they're portrayed as

if they happen in distinct arenas.

And although they're largely kept in the background,

Lady Bird is littered with references

to the major historical events of the era,

from 9/11 to the economic crisis,

flagged up on school notice boards and on the TV news.

Your father doesn't have a job.

He lost his job.

Do you need him to come in here and explain that to you?

Part of the appeal of both Lady Bird and American Graffiti

is that they speak to the audience's experience of youth

by working hard to recreate the director's experience.

Greta Gerwig did this by immersing her cast and crew

in the detritus of her adolescence,

giving them copies of her high school yearbooks

and showing them around the sights of her hometown.

And it's the ability to convey a sense of authenticity,

the idea that this could have happened to you,

that can make or break a coming-of-age film.

Arguably, the most important choice a director makes

when creating a film in this genre is who to cast.

Coming-of-age films have the potential to make actors into icons.

Think of James Dean or even the Bratpack actors

who dominated the '80s teen market.

I can't believe that I'm actually here.

Pretty bad, yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty bad.

Of course, the younger your cast, the more challenges there are.

By definition, most stars of coming-of-age movies

won't be seasoned professionals.

They'll be younger performers.

Directors often have no choice

but to go by their instincts when casting.

Steven Spielberg famously cast Henry Thomas to play Elliott in ET

after an audition in which the young actor started crying

at the idea of having his alien friend taken away from him.

Well, he's mine and he lives with me and he likes me.

And he wants to stay here. He likes it here.

Well, we wouldn't hurt him or anything.

All we want to do is talk to him.

But I don't want you to take him away.

An audition which reduced those watching it to tears.

OK, kid, you got the job.

For some directors, the risk of being stuck

with a bad choice is even higher.

Think of Richard Linklater casting the six-year-old Ellar Coltrane

as Mason, the central character in Boyhood,

a film that was to be shot over 12 years.

Linklater didn't let his cast watch the footage of their performances

for more than a decade.

Happy birthday!

By which time Coltrane could barely remember himself at age six.

This really is the extreme of trying to capture

the authentic nature of growing up.

Capturing it as your actors literally get older.

Other film-makers have done the same thing over a series of films.

Francois Truffaut cast the 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Leaud

in The 400 Blows,

and the two of them were then bound together

in a string of subsequent films

featuring the same character, Antoine Doinel.

I've never played Quidditch.

And then there are the cast of the Harry Potter movies,

who grew up with their audiences, right before our eyes.

But Boyhood is particularly daring

because the whole journey is there in one film.

How old are you? 15. 15. Give me a hug.

And the real genius of this movie is that while watching it,

you simply forget about the head scrambling logistics of the project.

Instead we focus upon the characters themselves,

undistracted by the changing faces

and fashions of the world in which they live,

or by the risks which Linklater took

in mounting this project in the first place.

Maybe it's that sense of risk that has encouraged many directors

from Satyajit Ray to Ken Loach,

to look beyond the standard casting routes.

Rather than pick a child actor,

why not go to the kind of place your film is set and find real people?

Thomas Turgoose was discovered in a youth club

for pupils with attendance issues.

Shane Meadows spotted something in his manner which perfectly

fitted the misfit at the centre of This Is England.

Andrea Arnold frequently uses a mix of seasoned actors

and first-time performers to add an extra layer to her films.

For her London-set coming-of-age story Fish Tank,

she cast newcomer Katie Jarvis after her assistant spotted Jarvis

having a row with her boyfriend at a station.

Don't mind me, girl. Carry on.

I was enjoying it.

As if.

But she paired her with Michael Fassbender.

You making eggs?

No.

What's the water for, then?

I'm making tea.

OK.

I'm a friend of your mother's.

You dance like a black.

It's a compliment. And what would you know?

For 2016's American Honey,

Arnold went to the Florida beaches where teenagers partied

to find her star, Sasha Lane.

Lane was on spring break when Arnold approached her,

just weeks before filming began.

American Honey follows a group of adolescents,

on a road trip around America, selling magazines.

Many of the cast had no previous acting experience,

but by ensuring that they travelled together,

just like their characters,

Arnold created a group dynamic which allowed her to capture plenty of

unplanned improvised moments which generated

a documentary-like sense of authenticity.

But behind that seemingly casual verite realism,

there are plenty of precisely-orchestrated

artistic decisions in American Honey.

Cinemaphotographer Robbie Ryan shoots in the squarer Academy Ratio

which has been Arnold's signatures since Fish Tank.

But here, his superb use of the four by three frame,

makes the image seem taller, rather than narrower,

than more commonplace widescreen formats

There's a lot of sky in American Honey,

a sense of expansiveness that marries shallow focus close-ups

of pierced and tattooed skin

with breathtaking vistas that seemed to sweep upwards towards the stars,

suggesting new horizons opening up for the teenage heroine.

This kind of attention to technical, stylistic detail

frequently gets overlooked in coming-of-age movies,

which are more often praised by critics

for their engaging performances or quotable dialogue.

But the way a story is framed is every bit as important

as how it's played.

In The Florida Project, Sean Baker uses a choreographed visual style

to conjure a child's sense of wonder.

Buildings and trees seem particularly large because of

the angle from which they're filmed and the way they fill the screen.

Shooting on both digital and 35mm,

cinematographer Alexis Zabe captures

these weird widescreen vistas in bright, Day-Glo colours,

lending a cartoonish atmosphere to this child eye's view

of the landscape around Florida's Disney World.

But he also finds heart stopping beauty in the image of a tree

which the six-year-old heroine significantly loves

because it's tipped over and it's still growing.

In her 1999 film Ratcatcher

Lynne Ramsey takes us visually into a child's imagination.

James lives in a Glasgow housing scheme during a bin strike

so when he catches a bus to a half-built estate

on the edge of a wheat field

it's a massive contrast to his regular life.

The framing of these shots, of James climbing into the field,

gives the impression of him climbing into a painting.

Filling the frame with just gold and blue,

Ramsey captures the feeling of being completely lost in the moment.

But of all the cinematic devices which take us back in time,

back to our youth, none is more powerful than music.

MUSIC: Lollipop by The Chordettes

So many great scenes coming-of-age movies play out to a jukebox

soundtrack, it's little wonder that pop music has become one of the

fundamental building blocks of the genre.

What's interesting, though, is how the use of pop music in movies

has changed over the decades.

When pop music was first used in movies in the '50s,

in films like The Blackboard Jungle,

it was used to evoke a sense of nowness,

to locate the movie at the cutting edge of contemporary culture.

MUSIC: Rock Around The Clock by Bill Hayley And His Comets.

Throughout the '50s and '60s, film-makers turned to musicians

like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley or the Beatles and Pink Floyd,

to give their films pop culture cachet.

From the beach party films of Annette Funicello

to youthsploitation classics like Easy Rider.

But then, in the '70s, something strange happened.

While films like Saturday Night Fever

continued to cash in on contemporary chart success,

others started to use pop to evoke a bygone age,

to bring something back from the past.

As film producer Steve Woolley once observed,

pop music in movies is like a knife,

you twist it and nostalgia comes pouring out.

As far as Woolley was concerned, pop music could be used like wallpaper,

covering over any anachronistic cracks in set design,

dialogue or hair and make-up.

This was a truism understood by George Lucas

when he made American Graffiti.

Having written his script to a jukebox selection of tunes,

Lucas ensured that the film's soundtrack

did much of the heavy lifting when it came to evoking memories of 1962.

That's why Wolfman Jack's radio show is such a constant presence.

Oh, shit!

Why'd you do that?

I don't like that surfing shit.

Rock and roll's been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died.

The soundtrack reflects the importance of music to teenagers.

The music we hear is played in real situations

where the characters can hear it,

on car radios or at school dances.

It's a constant soundtrack to their lives

and it transports the audience right back to the era.

MUSIC: Runaway by Del Shannon

All right, baby, here we go with another caller to the station.

Answer the phone, dummy!

Since George Lucas demonstrated how well

the nostalgic jukebox soundtrack could work,

it's been exploited by producers

on both sides of the Atlantic to conjure specific eras,

from the British classic Quadrophenia,

based on The Who's 60s-set rock opera...

MUSIC: Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere by The Who

What's this rubbish, then? Ready, Steady, Go.

MUSIC: The Killing Moon by Echo and the Bunnymen

..to Richard Kelly's 80s-set cult classic, Donnie Darko.

Music has the power to connect the audience to the characters

but it also has the power to connect the characters to each other.

In Moonlight, the intimate childhood relationship

between Chiron and Kevin is rekindled

because Kevin hears a song that sparks a memory and makes him

phone Chiron, after years apart.

The scene takes place in a diner.

As we saw in American Graffiti,

a key location for so many American coming-of-age movies.

MUSIC: Hello Stranger by Barbara Lewis

Crucially, there's a jukebox in the diner

and Kevin puts on the Barbara Lewis track Hello Stranger,

a song which somehow helps these two men,

who have become strangers,

rediscover the intimate friendship they shared as kids.

# Seems like a mighty long time... #

Is it mere coincidence that director Barry Jenkins,

a very cine-literate film-maker,

chose a disc from the same period in which American Graffiti is set?

Now that connection might not be conscious

but on the level of emotion and mood,

it seems to bind Moonlight

to Lucas' wellspring of cinematic nostalgia.

MUSIC: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by The Platters

So, the time and place is set,

the main characters have been established,

and the right music's playing in the background.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, in the case of coming-of-age movies conflict is always lurking

just around the corner. Most often embodied in the form of adults.

You should just go to city college,

You know, with your work ethic, just go to city college and then to jail,

and then back to city college,

and then maybe you'd learn to pull yourself up

and not expect everybody to do...

SHE SCREAMS

For every child or stunted adolescent

at the centre of the coming-of-age movie,

there's a grown-up who helps define them,

either by inspiring or understanding them,

or giving them something to revolt against.

Sometimes parents embody a wider cultural conflict.

Anyway, there was a scout from America there today,

and he's offered me a place at a top university,

with a free scholarship and a chance to play football professionally.

And I really want to go.

And if I can't tell you what I want now

then I'll never be happy whatever I do.

You let her leave her sister's wedding

to go to a football match?

In Rebel Without A Cause, a coming-of-age movie

which is also one of the first mainstream teen movies,

it all comes down to the particular psychology of Jim Stark's family.

Throughout his 1955 classic,

director Nicholas Ray continually flags up

the disconnected family dynamic with visual clues.

The film was made when the very idea of the teenager was being born,

and the red jacket worn by James Dean as Jim

would become an icon of teen angst.

It's bright colour in sharp contrast

to the drab, adult world around him.

According to the film's publicity,

Dean's Jim Stark was the bad kid from a good home,

although the film itself seems to reverse that equation,

laying the blame for Jim and Judy's alienation squarely at the feet of

their loving parents.

Look at the vertigo-inducing camera angles in this key scene.

He's home.

Oh, you're home.

Oh!

You're home. Are you all right?

Where were you? We were so worried.

Much of Jim's torment comes from the fact that, as far as he's concerned,

the pecking order of his family is topsy-turvy.

With his mother, who he fears, as a woman at the top, and his father,

who he needs to be a man, at the bottom.

You told me, you said you want me to tell the truth.

Now, didn't you say that?

You can't turn it off.

Well, he's not saying...

For Jim, family life is in chaos,

and the staging and camera angles reflect that inner turmoil.

You'll learn, when you're older, Jim.

Well, I don't think that I want to learn that way.

Well, it doesn't matter, anyway, because we're moving.

You are not tearing me loose again!

Fast forward more than 50 years and the failings of parents

are highlighted in the shooting style of Matt Reeves' vampire story,

Let Me In,

a US remake of Tomas Alfredson's Let The Right One In.

Look how the mother's face is out of focus in this scene,

emphasising the emotional distance between parent and child.

She's there, yet somehow removed.

But just as parent-child relationships

have evolved since the 1950s, we've seen screen parents evolve

as new generations of film makers take on the genre.

Hello.

The fallible parent is no longer there

just as a two dimensional prop for comic asides

or as a catalyst for angst.

They may now be a fully-fleshed-out character

with similar insecurities to our protagonist.

OK, we're all just winging it, you know.

In Richard Linklater's Boyhood Mason's parents,

played by Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette,

are undergoing their own coming-of-age journeys

which we also see play out over 12 years.

You know what I'm realising?

My life is just going to go, like that.

This series of milestones,

getting married, having kids, getting divorced,

the time that we thought you were dyslexic,

when I taught you how to ride a bike.

Getting divorced, again.

Getting my Masters degree.

Finally getting the job I wanted.

Sending Samantha off to college.

Sending you off to college.

You know what's next?

Huh? It's my fucking funeral!

Just go, and leave my picture.

Aren't you jumping ahead by, like, 40 years or something?

I just...thought there would be more.

With parents flawed or even absent from coming-of-age films,

other figures may take on the role of mentor,

reaching out to support alienated children and inspire them.

In Persepolis, the story of a rebellious teenager

growing up against the backdrop of the Iranian revolution,

this figure is our heroine's grandmother.

She tells Marjane to stay true to herself,

an important lesson in any journey to self-discovery.

In your lifetime, you're going to meet a lot of jerks.

If someone hurts you, just tell yourself

it's due to their lack of intelligence.

That way you'll never sink down to their level.

Because there's nothing worse in this world

than bitterness and revenge.

Never lose sight of your dignity.

Always stay true to yourself.

Often this mentor figure is quite literally a teacher,

whether it's Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society...

Medicine, law, business, engineering.

These are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.

But poetry, beauty, romance, love...

these are what we stay alive for.

..or Julie Walters in Billy Elliot.

MUSIC: We Love To Boogie by T Rex

Go on!

And sometimes, like Maggie Smith in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie,

they may be flawed or even destructive figures themselves.

Rome.

This is a large formation of the Il Duce's facisti.

They are following him in noble destiny.

I myself mingled with such a crowd.

I wore my silk dress with red poppies

which is right for my colouring.

Benito Mussolini, Il Duce.

Italy's leader supreme.

A Roman worthy of his heritage, the greatest Roman of them all.

Whether the adults are oppressive or benign,

escaping from their world

can often be a liberating moment for our heroes,

and the best coming-of-age films capture that youthful energy.

Deniz Gamze Erguven's Mustang is the story of teenage sisters

imprisoned by their family for messing around with boys

in a remote, conservative village in Turkey.

In the middle of the film, the girls escape to a football match.

In a series of tight shots, we see them on a bus and then at the game,

experiencing a moment of pure joy

that could be at any youthful gathering in the world.

They're surrounded by their peers, who often embody values themselves,

for better or worse.

Two households,

both alike in dignity,

in fair Verona...

A dog of the house of Capulet moves me!

The idea of teen gangs is as old as Shakespeare,

and whether it's Marlon Brando's bikers in The Wild One

or Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange,

cinema has traditionally treated them at best with ambivalence.

But there is an intensity to childhood friendships

familiar to most of us,

and directors have sought to capture this in coming-of-age films.

They might be groups with a clearly defined style and set of values,

like the skinheads in This Is England.

Or a looser gang of buddies, like the kids in Stand By Me.

THEY SING THE BALLAD OF PALADIN

Like the adults we've just seen,

there's something inherently ambiguous in the idea of a gang.

It can be supportive of the protagonist,

but also potentially dangerous.

Celine Sciamma's Girlhood is one of my favourite movies of recent years

and tells the story of teenage life in the housing projects of Paris.

It's about a gang of girls whose pastimes involve

fighting and thieving,

both of which become bonding rituals.

RAISED VOICES

Girlhood was billed in some sections of the press

as an expose of girl gangs.

But, crucially, Sciamma has said that French young women today

ARE this girl,

emphasising the universality and authenticity of her story.

MUSIC: Diamonds by Rhianna

SHE MOUTHS:

# Shine bright like a diamond... #

The closeness of the girls is captured in a key moment

in which the gang dance in stolen dresses.

# You and I, you and I... #

In this scene, Rhianna's Diamonds is allowed to play out

uninterrupted, as the group of girls dance and sing along.

It's a bonding moment which approaches transcendence.

# We're like diamonds in the sky. #

The group sing-along is, of course, a well-worn cinematic device.

Think of the bus sing-along to Elton John in Almost Famous...

MUSIC: Tiny Dancer by Elton John

..or to Lady Antebellum in American Honey.

MUSIC: Wild, Wild Whisper by Lady Antebellum.

These simple moments capture the appeal

of being in the group for the characters,

and because we, inevitably, feel the urge to sing along,

we feel part of that group too.

But some aspects of gang membership are altogether more ritualistic.

In a genre that is all about finding identity,

a teenage gang provides a set of rules

that our protagonists can choose to obey or to break.

So we decided to show Tai the ropes at Bronson Alcott High School.

That is Alana's group over there. They do the TV station.

They think that's the most important thing on earth.

Coming-of-age movies can be home to distinct teen tribes

with their own codes and cultures.

And there's Elton in the white vest, and all the most popular boys...

Knowing the tribes is crucial, which is why

there's often a key scene in these movies taking us through the gangs.

These scenes are there in any number of Hollywood movies,

but they also pop up in British settings,

like the Midlands school ground of This Is England.

What the fuck are they? These? I'm wearing them for a bet.

What's your excuse? Cheeky bastard.

Woodstock's that way, pal.

Fuck off. At least I don't look like Count Dracula!

In 2004's Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey,

Lindsey Lohan plays the daughter of anthropologists who's recently moved

from Africa to start school in Ohio.

SHE SCREAMS

I'm OK.

Sorry. I'll be careful.

She quickly discovers that, anthropologically speaking,

high school's not that different from the jungle.

Here. This map is going to be your guide to North Shore.

Now, where you sit in the cafeteria is crucial

because you got everybody there.

You got your freshman, ROTC guys,

preps, JV jocks, Asian nerds...

..cool Asians,

varsity jocks,

unfriendly black hotties,

girls who eat their feelings,

girls who don't eat anything,

desperate wannabes,

burn-outs,

sexually-active band geeks,

the greatest people you will ever meet,

and the worst.

Beware of the Plastics.

These gangs don't just look different, they talk different.

Hello. It was his 50th birthday.

Whatever.

The best coming-of-age films have created a slang

that's filtered through into the language

and, ironically, ends up transcending generations.

The 1988 black comedy Heathers, written by Daniel Waters,

brother of Mean Girls director Mark Waters,

has even been cited several times in the Oxford English dictionary.

Jealous, much?

Heather, why can't you just be a friend?

Why are you such a megabitch?

Such a pillowcase.

What is your damage, Heather?

Fuck me gently with a chainsaw.

In coming-of-age movies with a female protagonist

there's often a point where the main character

ditches her true friends in favour of a different group.

Now, breaking the rules of one group to obey the rules of another

can act as a social passport to popularity.

But, as the protagonists of Mean Girls,

Pretty In Pink and, more recently, Ladybird, all learn,

that popularity comes at a price.

It's a made up thing so we all can participate.

You can't do anything unless you're the centre of attention, can you?

Yeah, well, you know your mom's tits? They're fake. Totally fake.

She made one bad decision at 19! Two bad decisions!

In Heathers, Winona Ryder finds herself embroiled in a murderous web

for Christian Slater's Jason Dean,

a teen rebel name if ever there was one. Now!

Writer Daniel Waters and director Michael Lehman

wanted to play with teen clique cliches

and explore their darker sides.

Because, in the coming-of-age genre,

growing up isn't always Pretty In Pink.

You got some on you?

Nice.

What?

Bea...

I just got the curse. Ew.

Coming-of-age seems have long been a core feature of horror movies,

many of which deal with the awkward changes of adolescence

expressed through monstrous metaphor.

In horror cinema, a young girl's passage to womanhood

is often associated with the birth of a supernatural talent

such as telekinesis in Carrie,

witchcraft in The Craft,

or werewolf transformation in Ginger Snaps.

Let's get out of here.

My favourite film of 2017 was Raw,

a French Belgian horror fantasy

from writer-director Julia Ducournau,

which used the taboo theme of cannibalism to portray its central

character's transformation from innocent youth

to fully fledged adult.

Garance Marillier stars as Justine,

a vegetarian student who arrives at veterinary college,

where she's showered in blood, part of an initiation ceremony

that knowingly evokes the climax from Carrie.

Like Carrie, Raw's virginal Justine is isolated from her peers,

struggling with the enforced debauchery

that finds students crawling like dogs,

drinking like fish and mating like rabbits.

But once she's tasted forbidden flesh,

Justine cannot go back to her former innocence.

The cannibalistic gore would seem to place the movie

firmly in the horror genre,

but Ducournau calls Raw a portrait of the alienation

that most girls feel during their teenage years,

a rites of passage drama about sisterly rivalry,

family legacy and peer pressure,

classic coming-of-age themes all dressed up in the clothing

of cutting-edge horror.

But amid the horrors and traumas of adolescence,

there's still much to enjoy and celebrate.

Think of the makeover scenes that are a staple of so many teen movies.

From The Breakfast Club...

to Clueless...

..to This Is England,

coming-of-age movies are about kids trying to find out who they are,

trying different identities on for size,

and a makeover scene is the perfect way to do that.

Honestly, mate, you look sterling.

So am I in the gang now?

Well, not yet. Get your shirt on. Let's see your Ben Sherman, then.

The moment is half Cinderella, half Superman,

when the glasses are whipped off and the character is reborn.

That's a good fit, that. It's a good fit, mate.

Turn around, let's have a look at you. Amazing. Oh, mate.

Look at that. What a transformation.

Yeah. He looks like you.

Brilliant. Really good.

Few of these films would have found their audience

if they hadn't managed to capture the joy of being young.

But one emotion can dominate adolescence,

the most bittersweet rite of passage of all.

Coming-of-age movies can be light and silly or dark and moving.

There's one theme that has shades of all those moods,

first love.

Jordana and I enjoyed a glorious, atavistic fortnight of lovemaking,

humiliating teachers and bullying the weak.

I've already turned these moments into

the Super 8 footage of memory.

One of the reasons I love Jeremy is that it seems to me to perfectly

capture the bewildering experience

of falling in love for the first time.

And I still consider Susan, the heroine of Jeremy,

to be my first girlfriend,

despite the fact that I've never met her because...

Well, because she's a fictional character.

Look at this sequence in which the gawky Jeremy

attempts to phone Susan for the first time.

Oh, what did you do today?

I, I woke up.

I had some orange juice.

Jeremy, it's only, it's only nine o'clock.

Now compare that with this sequence

from Sophia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides.

Hello? Go.

MUSIC: Hello, It's Me by Todd Rundgren

Call us. 727 0487.

Shit, it's them.

The films are completely different and were made decades apart,

but the awkwardness they portray,

the inability to say what you mean when you're young,

and the way in which they choose to portray it is exactly the same.

You need some new trousers. Those baggy ones are awful.

I'll talk to Mum about it.

New ones, Italian.

If you're going to start falling in love,

you'll have to start taking care of yourself.

Coming-of-age movies allow film-makers to approach love quite

differently to the rom-com genre.

These aren't glossy relationships, full of sparkling repartee.

First love is full of awkwardness

and feeling that your world has been turned on its head.

We are clinging to the surface of this planet

while it spins through space at 1,000 miles an hour,

held only by the mystery force called gravity.

Wow. A lot of people panic when you tell them that,

and they just fall off. Oh...

But these movies are also a chance for film-makers

to turn tradition and stereotypes upside down.

Taking a lead from Romeo and Juliet,

the forbidden nature of a love affair,

whether for reasons of gender,

culture or race, may act as the dramatic motor of the story.

Recently, Call Me By Your Name became an awards-garlanded hit,

dealing with the once taboo subject

of a relationship between a young man and his older male paramour,

riffing on themes from The Graduate,

but inflected with the same sensuality

which infused Blue Is The Warmest Colour - the story of a relationship

between a teenage girl and an older woman.

And then there are the coming-of-age movies which completely blur gender

lines - films like Makoto Shinkai's Your Name,

in which the male and female protagonists

swap their bodies and sexes.

A theme previously explored in films like the 1982 Japanese hit,

Tenkosei, or more recently, the Scandinavian oddity Girls Lost.

Whatever the gender,

most coming-of-age stories tap into that Endless Love idea

that you'll never love anyone as much as your first love.

In these stories, young love rarely ends well.

Often the best you can hope for is bittersweet memories as you face

the cold light of day.

As we've seen, coming-of-age movies show characters on a journey between

childhood and adulthood.

So something has to happen that changes everything.

It's the moment which says we have to grow up,

and it's the big moment to which these movies are so often heading.

Death is obviously the big hitter here.

It could be the accidental death of a rival in Rebel Without A Cause,

the end to adolescent fun as it literally spirals out of control.

HE SCREAMS

Or the death of a kestrel, representing the freedom of youth,

killed by an overbearing brother in Kes.

Look what he's done, Mam. Look at it.

He's a right 'un. That were a rotten trick anyway, weren't it?

It were a rotten trick what he did to me, wasn't it?

You've no need to take it out to a bird,

you could have took it out to me!

Sometimes that lesson is just a disillusionment with a hero.

Think of Phil Daniels discovering that super-mod Sting

is actually a cringing hotel bellboy in Quadrophenia.

# Bellboy!

# Carried his baggage out... #

Bellboy! Bellboy!

Or the moment you finally stand up to the dominant adult in your life.

Sandy.

Think of Maggie Smith in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie -

a charismatic teacher, yes,

but one against whom her most fervent disciple, Sandy,

must ultimately rebel.

It was you who betrayed me.

I didn't betray you.

I simply put a stop to you.

Oh...

I see.

No, you don't see.

You don't see that you're not good for people.

In what way?

In what way, Sandy, was I not good for you?

You are dangerous and unwholesome

and children should not be exposed to you!

Always remember, in the end

coming-of-age is about leaving school

not standing on desks and sulking.

There he is! I see him! Look! Look, over there! I see him!

I see him!

These big moments of change usually come later in the films.

Think of Stand By Me where the children's discovery of the

dead body happens in the third act.

But director John Singleton cleverly references Stand By Me in an early

scene in Boyz N The Hood to show that one child's dramatic loss

of innocence can be another's everyday life.

Look at these scenes.

Both show a group of young friends on the hunt for a dead body.

The train track, the wandering friends,

even the body itself echo each other.

An older gang of teenagers appear in both to confront the kids.

In Stand By Me, which is based on the Stephen King story The Body,

this scene is the moment to which the boys' journey has been leading.

But in Boyz N The Hood this scene

happens in the first act of the film.

With this nod to Stand By Me,

Singleton establishes that in this world his young protagonists

are always just a step away from violence and death.

Y'all want to see a dead body?

But even in the gentlest of scenes,

there's something about the end of childhood that makes for some of the

most emotionally resonant moments in cinema.

How many adults watching the end of Toy Story 3 with their children

could maintain a dry eye as Andy passes his beloved Woody and Buzz

on to the next generation?

I have some toys here.

Ooh! You hear that, Bonnie?

It's a remarkably moving scene because we've all been through

the moment when we quite literally put away childish things.

Someone told me you're really good with toys.

It's also powerful because this is the end of the third film in the

series, and so many of the audience have either grown up or grown older

alongside Andy.

So, in a way,

watching the trilogy come to an end

is itself a rite of passage for all of us.

This is Jessie, the roughest, toughest cowgirl in the whole West.

She loves critters.

Which raises the question,

what the hell are they going to do in the forthcoming part four?

As we've seen, the best coming-of-age movies

vividly capture that moment we've all been through

on the cusp of adult life.

And if you can't stay 17 forever, what happens next?

LAUGHTER AND CHATTER

Remember the gang?

In movies like American Graffiti, Stand By Me or Boys N The Hood,

a group of buddies come to represent

the different paths our hero could take.

These three movies end by telling us

what subsequently became of the different characters,

and they suggest what might have happened to the hero

under different circumstances.

See you. Not if I see you first.

One brother left, man.

Chris did get out. He enrolled in the college courses with me,

and although it was hard he gutted it out like he always did.

He went on to college and eventually became a lawyer.

Last week he entered a fast food restaurant.

Just ahead of him, two men got into an argument.

One of them pulled a knife.

Chris, who had always made the best peace, tried to break it up.

He was stabbed in the throat.

He died almost instantly.

These postscripts can be both poignant and remarkably stark.

Yet it's in the very nature of the genre

that life still lies ahead for most of these characters

and we leave them facing an uncertain future,

but hopefully just that little bit wiser.

It's no coincidence that so many coming-of-age films,

from The 400 Blows to This Is England to Moonlight,

end in the same way -

with their hero staring out towards

a distant horizon,

then turning to look at the camera,

to connect with us.

Next week, I'll voyage across time and space

to explore the secrets of science fiction cinema.