Towelhead

A 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl (Summer Bishil) is sent to live with her divorced father when she is caught letting her mother’s boyfriend shave her pubic hair—and that’s only the beginning of her sexual confusion and exploitation. Readers of Alicia Erian’s novel can decide for themselves if writer-director Alan Ball has done it justice. Taken by itself, though, Ball’s movie is seamy and distasteful, seething with ridicule and contempt for most of the characters, seeking to provoke sour, derisive laughs at its most repellent moments, and all prodded along by Ball at a lurching, sluggish pace that seems to go on for days. Joyless and unsavory, this loathsome movie sullies actors and audience alike; it’s saved from kiddie porn only by the fact that Bishil was, in real life, 18 when it was made.