To hear Julie tell it in the Valley Girlremake,??? ?? her story begins with an entire shopping mall full of strangers coming together for an impromptu song-and-dance performance of "We Got the Beat" in 1983.
Her daughter, in the present day, is not buying it. "Nope. Stop," she groans. "You were singing and dancing on a fountain?"
Julie shrugs. "That's how I remember it. That's what it felt like."
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With that line, Valley Girlreveals its hand. Though its main storyline is set in the '80s, this film isn't a faithful recreation of the era, and it's not trying to be.
"We certainly want it to feel like you're in the '80s, but our own curated version of the '80s," director Rachel Lee Golenberg tells Mashable on the phone. "Some of it is historically accurate, but having the movie resonate emotionally and visually was more important than being perfectly historically accurate to us."
Valley Girl is less interested in preserving the decade in amber than in capturing the spirit of it.
Instead, the version this Valley Girlserves up is the '80s as we remember them feeling, refracted through the cultural touchstones of the era and the wry affection of distance. Where the original Valley Girl (1983) was a more or less realistic teen comedy about the romance between sheltered Valley girl Julie and Hollywood punk rocker Randy, the remake reimagines their saga as a jukebox musical, crammed wall to wall with the hits of the decade.
It works because, like Moulin Rouge, a film Goldenberg cites as a "touchstone," Valley Girllays the groundwork for that music with vivid characters and a compelling narrative, and then reworks the songs so they feel perfectly organic in context. "That's what I wanted to see with this movie, was not throw a bunch of random '80 songs in and have it feel gimmicky," she says, "but really to make them feel earned and make them feel of the movie and of the characters and be our own Valley Girlversion of them."
So "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" becomes a wistful longing for something more than fun, Madonna's "Crazy for You" gets rearranged as a punk song, and Depeche Mode and Hall & Oates meld together in a jazzercise medley. It's all playful, poppy fun, but situated in a way that feels true to the characters and their journey, so that "we're never taking a music break to go off and do a musical number," explains Goldenberg.
The combination of familiar tunes, a fresh story, and genuine emotion turns out to be an intoxicating one — even if, like Goldenberg, you don't actually have any memories of coming of age during that decade. "I made it to first grade in the '80s," she laughs. But, she adds, "Even though I didn't get to properly live through it, maybe that's part of the reason that I'm able to idealize it so much and get so excited about it, is because I wasn't there."
A younger Julie (Jessica Rothe) falls head over heels for Randy (Josh Whitehouse). Credit: Orion Pictures Indeed, Valley Girlis less interested in preserving the decade in amber than in capturing the spirit of it, through the dynamic experience of nostalgia: Julie walking a well-trod path down memory lane to revisit a past even she knows never quite existed while reliving emotions she did, and inviting us to go along on the entire ride with her.
From that older, wiser perspective, Julie is better able to see what her adventures with Randy were really about. “It’s actually not, at its heart, a love story,” stresses Goldenberg. “It seemslike a love story. But it's actually Julie's discovery of her life and what her life could be, and Randy's this pathway for her to discover her passion and to start taking control of her destiny.”
It's an arc Goldenberg knows well, having drawn from her own experiences as a high schooler in suburban Massachusetts discovering the hardcore music scene for the first time. "Yes, there were guys that I fell in love with, or that I was interested in, or that I was interested in that weren't interested in me, and they felt really important at the time," she says. "But the thing that really had a lasting effect on me was that experience of widening my world."
The original film ends happily enough, with Julie and Randy riding off into the Valley together. But Goldenberg's telling doesn't stop there. The older Julie is one whose story has continued long after that whirlwind courtship, who can tell her teenage daughter that "a life happened" after that magical night. Valley Girlmay revel in the sights and sounds of the '80s, but it's really a love letter to the people we once were, and the people we became as a result — whatever decade we grew up in.
Valley Girl is available now on VOD.