John From

Although this Portuguese indie feature gets some good performances out of its young cast, it is ultimately a bit of a somnambulant affair that doesn’t quite succeed as the coming-of-age comedy it is clearly supposed to be in its portrait of adolescent teenage escape from modern suburban banality. John From centers on Rita (Julia Palha) and Sara (Clara Riedenstein), two teens bored out of their minds in the bleak, nondescript outskirts of Lisbon, who struggle to find creative ways to make life interesting, which at first means attending a lot of predictable teeny-bopper parties. But when Rita, trolling the Internet one night, stumbles upon an exhibition on Melanesian natives, she seems to undergo a complete transformation, finding solace in a primitivist paradise of the mind, which shields her from everyday quotidian existence. Director João Nicolau can’t seem to get the film’s tonalities right: the comedic aspirations are too underconfident to make for a full-blown teen comedy, but there aren’t enough compelling emotional and personal conflicts here to make this work as a drama either. Still, Nicolau’s heart is in the right place in this uneven film. A strong optional purchase. (M. Sandlin)