The Miseducation of Cameron Post is set in the early 1990s. This comedy drama revolves around a high-school student sent to a Christian gay conversion camp in rural Montana after she’s caught in a relationship with another girl.
I’d like to think society has moved on in its attitudes towards sexual diversity since its timeframe, but I fear the film may still have some minds to convert with its celebration of tolerance. But The Miseducation of Cameron Post does more than a deliver a message: this is a lovely, richly shaded portrait of adolescence in all its shifting moods, shot through with a melancholy sweetness and sly, intoxicating humour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEdngvMGjg0
Chloë Grace Moretz plays Cameron, a girl in her mid-teens living with Ruth, her devout, well-meaning aunt who has been caring for Cameron since the death of her parents. In an extended opening sequence we see Cameron prepare for that staple of teen rituals, the high school prom, her date a handsome lad called Jamie. The scenes flit by with little dialogue, director Desiree Akhavan staging them as a kind of blurry reverie. But the look of awkward discomfort on Cameron’s face as she poses for the camera hints that Jamie isn’t quite the dream date he appears.
In fact, we know that Cameron is seeing her friend Coley (Quinn Shephard), and when the two girls are discovered making out in the back of car, Ruth sends Cameron off to God’s Promise, a residential school in a remote woodland where gay and lesbian kids are supposed to be purged of their urges.
It’s a pretty grim basis for any educational establishment, and Akhavan, adapting a novel by Emily M Danforth, never shies from the uncomfortable realities of life at God’s Promise.