Her reflection comes as a revelation. In the safety of her bedroom, Connie (Laura Dern), the 15-year-old protagonist of Joyce Chopra’s 1985 feature debut Smooth Talk (recently released on a Criterion Blu-ray), adjusts her new halter top in the mirror, its strings crisscrossed down the middle of her chest to hang limp over her exposed midriff. The camera observes her in profile as she spins and arches her back, her gaze glued to the supple body in the reflection, luxuriating in her new possession. This scene rhymes with another that Chopra filmed about 15 years prior to the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, at a time when the possibility of her directing a feature must have seemed nearly impossible: in the opening shot of Joyce at 34 (1972), Chopra’s trailblazing autobiographical documentary, the filmmaker herself stands frozen before the looking glass, her hands clasped behind her as the camera homes in on the mirror and, within it, her round, pregnant belly, like an eclipse dwarfing her petite frame. “I’m really angry at being biologically this way,” she confesses in voiceover. “I want it to stop now. I’m also a filmmaker. I want to get back to work.”
The act of looking in the mirror is a slippery one for women: it reveals the boundless possibilities of womanhood and their tragic curtailment; the shallow satisfactions of vanity as well as humbling disappointment. When Connie looks at her reflection, she sees the promise of adventure in her unearthed sensuality;. “I understand it very much…[that] deep longing.”
