Valley Girl (1983)

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2019) Considering that Valley Girl is a quasi-anthropologic study of life and love between Los Angeles neighbourhoods playing off the eponymous stereotype popularized by Frank Zappa, I clearly made a mistake by watching it in its French-Canadian dub: No amount of repetition of “… genre…” as an accurate translation of “… like…” is as charming as the stereotypical overuse of the word as punctuation in the original Valley dialect. At least the translation is on firmer footing when it comes to presenting a different-sides-of-the-track romance between a hippie Valley girl (Deborah Foreman) and a punk rockfish boy (Nicolas Cage) from Hollywood—the vaguely disreputable Hollywood as seen from another L.A. neighbourhood. Amusingly enough, Cage is here introduced by teenage girls squealing in admiration about his body, screaming, “He’s like a god!” One thing that doesn’t get lost in translation is the time-travelling aspect of going back to 1983 and taking a look at how teenagers (approximately) lived at the time, in between malls and music joints. (And that strange thing called sushi.)  The soundtrack may not be to everyone’s liking, but it is certainly evocative of a time and place. Director Martha Coolidge wasn’t looking to make a document for the ages with this low-budget romance, but that’s roughly what happened—Valley Girl wasn’t just a sizable hit at the time, but it endures as a fond memory. Next time, I’ll watch the original dub.