Reginald Harkema has become that rarest of oddities, a well-known Canadian editor (check out his entry at IMDB.) “A Girl Is A Girl” is his witty feature directing debut, a debatedly-autobiographical tale (suggested chiefly by similarity of charming star Andrew MacIntyre’s hair to Harkema’s) of a boy learning about love from his evolving string of girlfriends. His baggage piles up and his wisdom grows, but which will be the master of his destiny? Harkema shot 34 hours of 16mm footage, framing his budget around improv and non-continuity cutting and what results is a warm, sharp pillow / pub-crawl through hipster love and pain. It has a male perspective, of course, and the ending left debates as to whether a girl is to blame for being a girl, but we learned our lessons from Fellini’s 8 1/2, now, didn’t we? For my part, I cringed manfully at the numerous bits I identified with, and scratched my head at the absence of Canadian distribution.
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