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The two movies about subteen hookers did not, as some people feared, lead to a succession of increasingly pornographic feature films starring moppets.
Instead their effect seems to have been to clear the air, so that the sexuality of the very young can now be dealt with without the eye rolling formerly considered appropriate to the violation of a taboo. Thus a distortion that falsified whole characterizations has been removed. To see the difference, one need only watch television drama, where the taboo still holds.
In an episode of ABC's popular series Family, the tomboyish daughter Buddy, 16, played by Kristy McNichol, also 16, was getting pressure from her boyfriend Zack (Leif Garrett) to sleep with him.
Buddy didn't feel ready for sex, but another teen queen was buzzing seductively around Zack, and Buddy didn't want to lose him. Would she or wouldn't she?
Since this was TV, the answer is not hard to guess. Buddy's decision to remain chaste was realistic for a girl her age. Going to bed with Zack also might have been realistic, except that television's conservatism, especially in hit series, ruled it out. The show was not really about making a choice; it was a coy and irritating tease.
A slightly easier problem is confronted in A Little Romance, the new film starring Diane Lane. Lane has a dizzying breadth of untroubled brow, a braces-just-came-off prettiness and a shy grin.
Where McNichol's Buddy role forces her toward cuteness, Lane is allowed to play a real kid. She is Lauren, an American child living in Paris, who falls in love with Daniel (Thelonious Bernard), a French boy just her age. Parents get in the way, but the children find an ally in an elderly French windbag (played foxily by Laurence Olivier) who says that he is a retired diplomat, but who turns out to be an unretired pickpocket.
Soon the three of them have given the adult world the skip, and are running away toward Venice, where the lovers intend to bind themselves together for eternity by kissing in a gondola under the Bridge of Sighs. This agreeable silliness works because the script by Allan Burns is sharp and funny, the two young actors are fresh and effective, Olivier is a howl, and Director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy, The Sting) has a fine comic touch.
Talent helps. But another reason the film succeeds is that Director Hill allows the kids to be madly romantic—they are 13, it's the right age—without sentimentalizing them. The ceremonial kiss in the gondola is the movie's steamiest scene, and active sexuality for these two is well in the future. But there is no pretense that it is not coming. Daniel and a buddy persuade Lauren to see a porno flick. She watches for a few minutes, then walks out, feeling sick. Daniel follows, ashamed of himself, trying to comfort her. Lauren nods; she is all right. She did not enjoy her view of the hydraulics of sex, but it has done no damage. The viewer feels that real children are, in fact, like this.