Just Looking

1955, New York. Fourteen-year-old Lenny is a curious boy with his mind fixed on one subject. Caught at it at home, his mother and stepfather pack him off to spend the summer in Queens with his aunt and her new husband. Lenny expects to be bored, but he meets a group of children his own age there and the summer goes somewhere else entirely. This was Jason Alexander's first film as a director. Suburban life in the fifties, the silences inside a family and the embarrassment of growing up are all handled in a comic register. The children's curiosity is neither mocked nor put on display; the film keeps it implied and works through awkward situations instead. What it is really about is less sex than a boy seeing his own family with new eyes. Gretchen Mol and Patti LuPone are also in the cast.