First Loves

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

GREGORY'S GIRL Directed and Written by Bill Forsyth

He is all haircut, tangled legs and misinformation. Most of his energy is devoted to coping with his own sudden, if spindly, growth. But there is some left over for trying to puzzle out the world's mysteries in general, the odd otherness of the opposite sex in particular. He does not smoke pot, play bad music too loudly, or greatly imperil his own or anybody else's virginity. In short, Gregory (Gordon John Sinclair) is what one used to think of as a typical teen-age boy back in the days when adolescence was a goofy phase that adults could afford to indulge instead of a time bomb that needs to be defused. Gregory's Girl seems to exist in some Brigadoon of the mind, where psychologists and sociologists are unnecessary and probably unheard of. Indeed, the setting is a far-off corner of Scotland, in a government-sponsored "new town," which supports a livelier life in its interstices than its bland surface promises.

But there is more to the appeal of Gregory's Girl than wistfulness for the kind of adolescence no one seems to enjoy any more. Writer-Director Bill Forsyth, working inexpensively on his native heath, is not one to confront life headlong and headon. He is a jogger not a sprinter, a man content to chug amiably along observing the world through a series of sidelong glances instead of driving single-mindedly toward a narrow goal.

Take the relationship the title seems to promise; it never becomes a relationship at all. Gregory starts mooning after Dorothy (Dee Hepburn) when she beats him out of his position on the boys' soccer team at school. A liberated lady, she throws him into total confusion by accepting his first offer of a date, then does him the favor of standing him up. Three of her pals take him over, passing him along from one to the next over the course of an evening. He ends up on a hillside with Susan (Clare Grogan), who likes him best and who, in the girls' collective, unspoken wisdom, is just the right speed for him. It is an opinion he comes to agree with gratefully.

Ensuring that his hero gets squared off and paired up is not the only thing on Forsyth's mind. He has a genial taste for mild eccentrics and sees to it that plenty of them wander in and out of Gregory's life. There is a friend who is overstuffed with useless facts ("Did you know when you sneeze it comes out of your nose at 160 miles per hour?" he inquires of a girl he's trying to impress), a headmaster who encourages a student's underground traffic in exotic pastry because he has an unmanageable sweet tooth, a ten-year-old sister, precociously wise in the ways of the world, who gives Gregory such good advice as he gets on how to conduct his life. There is even a penguin -- or rather, some one dressed up in a penguin suit -- who in explicably wanders the school's corridor, collecting misdirections on where he is supposed to report. For all we know, he is still looking for his roost.

There are no big meanings here; no big laughs, for that matter, either. Instead, there is a mild, but admirably stubborn singularity. Gregory's Girl does not offer anything as thick as slice life, just slivers of it, cut thin as smoked Scotch salmon. And tasting just as sweet . -- By Richard Schickel

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.