Don’t call it Girlhood: How Do You Measure a Year? (now on Max) documents a moment of every birthday in Ella Rosenblatt’s life from age 2-18, filmed by her father Jay Rosenblatt. Ingenious idea? For sure, and it earned the film a screening at the Locarno Film Festival and a 2023 Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short (Jay was also nominated in the same category the year prior for When We Were Bullies). “I waited 17 years to look at what we shot,” Jay says via an opening title card, and I guarantee he didn’t hold it together while piecing together the footage, because you won’t hold it together while watching it, and it’s not even your kid.
The Gist: First, a quick progressive montage of Ella, from toddler to teenager. Then, a title card: TWO. She’s hilarious. Every two-year-old is hilarious. Same for three- and four- and five-year-olds – there’s a moment in the THREE segment that’s uproarious – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Jay seems to have some decent interviewing skills, since he starts with easy questions (What’s your favorite food?), works up to the more complicated ones (What do you want to do when you grow up?) and then starts loading them with dynamite (What is power?). She’s SIX when she rather precociously says that nightmares are “scary dreams” and that dreams are “not scary nightmares,” and it feels like she’s starting to, you know, put things together.
Among Ella’s consistencies of character through the years include a love of animals, a considerable appreciation for Hannah Montana and a terrific singing voice. At EIGHT she sings “Seasons of Love” from Rent, and inspires the title of the film; she eventually graduates to Beyonce. Jay’s questions get more sophisticated as Ella comes of age as a young woman – they talk about their frequently contentious relationship, what she’s afraid of, what she likes most about life, what her present self would say to her future self, what she thinks of this little project her dad foisted on her. And then we reach the EIGHTEEN segment and the lump in your throat manifests, as if on cue. You had to see it coming. Had to.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. It’s a masterwork. (Notably, Jay’s short I Used to Be a Filmmaker, is about Ella’s life from birth to 18 months old.)
Performance Worth Watching: Ella by default, but also because she seems so very much herself, even when she’s a little guarded with her answers.
Memorable Dialogue: “I hope you still like you.” – 11-year-old Ella talking to her future self
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: How Do You Measure a Year? is a home-movie experiment with a simple technique – clip microphone to daughter, point camera, ask questions – and concept, but it yields some profound insights into childhood, adolescence, adulthood and parenthood. That’s not surprising; if it hadn’t, and it was just something cute and sentimental, it wouldn’t have gotten as far as HBO and the Oscars. But Ella could be any average American kid who came of age in the 2010s (she’s 22 now). Of course, there are specificities of character and setting that emerge, but the film is subtextually a universal endeavor. It isn’t about the extraordinary events in their lives; if they’ve experienced triumph or tragedy, it goes unmentioned. Jay’s decision to ask Ella the same big, provocative questions every year gives us a yardstick to measure and observe adolescent human development.
Conceptually, the film functions on two levels: A loosely scientific one that charts incremental intellectual and emotional maturity. And the other, more prevailing, is about the emotional journey of a parent, that rollercoaster of joy and grief that underscores and reorients every single component of a mother or father’s life. We meet Ella when she’s an adorable little blob of hope and curiosity, and say goodbye to her when she achieves independence. For those of us who are raising or have raised children, watching her evolve from toddler to teenager to adult, and share her feelings openly and honestly, reflects our own lives as both parents and former children. Jay’s heartbreak – unspoken, but absolutely present – becomes ours too.
Our Call: STREAM IT. How Do You Measure a Year? is so very bitter and so very sweet – and essential viewing.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.